Membership Only Archives | Page 13 of 72

11 Content Ideas to Fill Your Social Media Calendar

A social media calendar can help you plan and schedule your social media posts in advance. With an organized calendar, you can ensure no days will go without a single piece of content being published.

Fresh, quality content is important to attract your target audience and keep them informed. But let’s face it. It can be challenging to find fresh social media ideas, especially when you have to post something daily on different platforms.

Next time you think there’s nothing for you to post, think again. Here are 11 content ideas to fill your social media calendar.

Industry news

If you find yourself at a loss when it comes to making updates on social media, sharing industry news is a great idea. Regularly posting informative articles will help turn your page into a trusted resource for relevant information.

Think about what your target audience would find helpful and relevant. Share links to relevant news and blogs.

Blog posts

Do you spend countless hours writing killer, quality content for your blog? Don’t let it go to waste Share your blog posts across your social media accounts.

In addition to giving you something new to post, sharing your blog posts on social media will help deliver a steady stream of visitors to your site. Make sure, though, that you tailor your message to fit each platform and audience.

Polls and surveys

People love answering questions, and polls provide the perfect avenue for this.

Polls are easy to make, encourage interactivity, and get people talking. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding of who your customers are. By reading their responses, you can learn from them directly and better understand their needs.

Videos

Video is the undeniable king of content marketing. In fact, they get exponentially more shares than texts and images combined. Not only are they convenient and efficient for the consumer, but they can also help you create an emotional connection with your audience.

If you aren’t creating video content for your brand or business, now is the time to get in front of the camera. I challenge you to do one this week. You can start by doing a Facebook Live or Instagram story. The first video is usually the hardest, but you’ll get better as you go.

Behind the scenes photo or video

Sharing behind the scenes content gives people an inside look into who you are and what your brand represents. People want to do business with people, not from a company that hides behind a logo. They want to know the people behind your products and services.

Behind the scenes, content humanizes your company and helps you build rapport with your target audience. Trust doesn’t come easily for businesses, but transparency is a great place to start.

Share a tip

Share tips that your audience might find useful. You may also consider turning it into a weekly post. For instance, “Tip Tuesday” or “Fun Fact Friday”. This way, your audience will have something to look forward to.

User-generated content

User-generated content is any content that has been published by fans. Nine out of ten consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than traditional advertising. That means, they’d rather hear from your clients and customers instead of you.

UGCs work well because they’re authentic. Plus, it puts customers front and center. It encourages engagement and helps you grow your audience.

When sharing user-generated content, always give credit where credit is due. Make sure that you tag the original poster in the post.

Infographics

People love information, but most people lean heavily toward visual content. Infographics are easily read, understood, and remembered. Your audience can easily scan the document and understand the message you’re trying to get across. Not only will they appreciate the new-found knowledge, but they’ll also find your information more credible and compelling.

Your employees

Posting photos of your employees help humanize your brand. It allows them to have a sneak peek of the people behind your products and services.

Go ahead and share photos of people who make your business possible. Without them, you won’t be able to operate.

Customer testimonial

Studies suggest that 74% of consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before they can trust a business. Sharing customer testimonials on social media is one of the best ways to build trust with your audience and add credibility to your brand.

Let your customer’s voices be heard on social media. Create an image with their testimonial or retweet their kind words. Don’t forget to include their name or handle.

Meme

Have you noticed more and more brands are incorporating humor into their social media marketing strategy? It’s because humor sells.

People love humorous content. Infusing humor into your social media content helps show your brand’s personality and get more people to engage with your content. Besides, posting only business-related content is simply boring.

July 1, 2020/by Kathlyn Angeles-Timbol

Identifying Your Target Market and Educating Them

We’ve been talking a little bit about really looking at your overall digital marketing strategy. This is something that we help our clients throughout the year. Because as we start a new year, we always look at, “Okay, what do we need to adjust for this year, what are our goals, what do we want to do?”

We usually have those quarterly goals, and now we’re entering in the second part of 2020 and it’s time to reflect on what’s working, what’s not working, and what we need to do for the remaining part of the year, but then also projecting into the new year.

I know it seems a little crazy to already be thinking about 2021, but things change, and so today we’ll talk about your target market and how to educate them.

What do those posts look like? How does building that relationship works with your target market? So a few things that I want you to do is just take a quick minute to reflect on your social media footprint, so to speak.

So what have your social media struggles been? What goals have you set for your social media strategy or that you want to set moving forward? And what social media platforms are you currently using, and which ones would you like to start using? So think of which ones are you using.

Re-evaluate the platforms you’re using

Think of which ones do you think that your target market is using. If you’re spending a lot of time on Twitter, for instance, and you’re not getting a lot of followers and you’re not getting a lot of engagement. But when you post on to Instagram or Facebook, you’re getting a lot more engagement. That may mean you need to re-evaluate the platforms you’re using.

Just because they’re out there doesn’t mean you need to be on all of them. Sometimes Twitter or Instagram works great for some of our clients, and other times they don’t. So it’s really thinking of where your audience is.

Survey your audience

One good way of doing this is sending out a survey, putting together a survey for your email list. “What platforms do you use the most? What times of day are you on those platforms?”

Really wanting to get that feedback from your audience so you can understand where they’re spending their time as well. And then going more into, “Do you have that target market clearly defined?”

Identify a niche you want to target

Sometimes we ask a business, “What’s your ideal client?” And they’ll say, “Oh, anyone, I work with everyone”.

Well, over the past 12 years of us being in business, we’ve learned that we don’t want to work with everyone. We have a clear niche of people that we want to work with.

If you are a healthcare practitioner, then you have a little bit more of a clear niche if you are an OBGYN, if you’re a family practitioner, if you are an orthopedic surgeon. It’s easier to define that target market because your service is already niched. If you are a realtor or even a massage therapist, a chiropractor, you’ll want to think more about the type of person you want to work with.

Questions to help you define your target audience

Do you know who they are?
Do you know how to find them and where to find them?
Are they using social media?
Where and how can you find them?
Do their core values align with yours?

And this is something that we’ve talked about in the past that’s really important to us as a company, is defining those core values and making sure that the people you’re working with aligning with that.

Tailor your content for your target audience

Are you engaging with your target market? Are you putting together content that is speaking to them?

If your audience is mostly families with younger kids and you’re putting content up about retirement or AARP, that’s a disconnect of your audience and your content messaging.

If you are a family practitioner, maybe your patients are more 55-plus, and you’re putting out kid activities and healthy kids snacks, you’re missing that connection with your audience.

So really identifying who are your clients or customers now, which ones have you really enjoyed working with and you have that relationship with, and then identifying why. Why do you like working with them? How do you get more clients or customers like them? So that’s really figuring out your target market, and then now that you’ve identified kind of looking at your social media footprint, you’ve looked at your target market.

Set SMART goals

Now let’s set some goals. And so it’s important to think of those smart goals for social media.

Specific. Your goal should be very clear, simple, and defined. Something along the lines of, “We want to grow our Facebook page to reach 3000 likes this year”.

Measurable. So how can you track these goals? Do you have a system in place with your email marketing that you can track how many emails you’ve gotten or how many likes? What are those analytics that are in place for you to be able to measure your results?

Achievable. Going into achievable, so this is kind of like what I said with being specific, make sure you’re setting goals that you can reach it.

If you have 100 likes and you want to get 10 million, that may not happen in a year but setting something simple, “We want to get to 2000. We want to have a thousand sign-ups from our paid efforts on social media this year.”

Realistic. So again, if your goal is to reach a million likes on your Facebook page but you only have 146 to start with, that may not be achievable within the next six months or next year. But how can we bring it into, “Okay, I wanna reach 2000 likes, I wanna reach 5000 likes.” And if that’s your number, then put in place that realistic of, “How am I gonna do that? What does it mean for me to reach that goal?”

Time-sensitive. If you say, “Oh, I want a million likes”, well, maybe over the course of 10 years or five years or three years that can happen. But, “This is my goal for the next six months. This is what I want to do, this is how I really wanna build those relationships with my target market to make sure that I am speaking to them.” And that leads me into the next piece, of Educate.

Educate your audience

So now that you identified your target market, you know who they are, you know what their interests are, you know their lifestyle, and they’re already, hopefully, seeing you or doing business with you, and so now it’s really important to educate them.

I love social media brands, whether they are a local business, a big brand, but they tell a story. And they highlight their customers.

The American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association do an amazing job with their social media campaigns. They are constantly highlighting stories of people that are struggling with diabetes, how they’ve overcome it, how their families overcome it. They’re always putting in place different resources and tools for their audience. And their audience, they have a mix of kids with Type 1 diabetes to adults with Type 2 diabetes, and their marketing is very clear. They’re educating each niche of their target market, they’re speaking to them on their level.

If you are a family practice or a massage therapist or a chiropractor, your clientele may vary in age and interest. So then it’s really figuring out, “What does that content look like? How can you take the time to educate each of them?” And this can be telling stories.

Tell your brand story

This is a great way to see that brand personality behind your business. I want to learn about who you are as a business owner, who your team is, where they come from, what are you guys passionate about.

Sharing stories on a personal level about the business, but then also having your patients share their stories. So when they started to come to see you, maybe they had a really tight cramp in their back and it was really hard for them to sleep. You know, over the course of three months of getting a massage or whatever that time frame is, they were able to feel normal again, and they were back to their old self and being able to play with their kids and go on their morning runs or whatever that story is.

People really resonate with stories. I don’t care what industry you’re in, stories are really important. And they’re educational because people want to say, “They’re like me. They have that issue too, I’m not alone.”

And so the storytelling piece is a very important piece of your marketing, and if you can take it a step further and do some videos around that storytelling if you can have your client or your patient do a video testimonial or story. And then as you do your stories for your side, use those, do videos, interview one of your staff members or your nurses or your doctors. Really have that brand personality there.

Build your network

Make sure that you are building your network. So now that you know your target market, you’re speaking their language. Look at who’s liking your posts and start to educate them and reach out to them. So, people that are liking your post, you can go and invite them to like your page.

In our next vlog, we’re gonna be talking about doing some more, like boosting posts and Facebook ads, and so this is another way you can increase your networks by utilizing boosted posts and ads to reach your target market. So right now you may be going into different Facebook groups or looking on Instagram for certain hashtags.

If you are in a certain city, you want to look for people that are in your area. Start following them. Really work on building that network of your target market on the platforms you’re using. And that is a really important piece because you wanna make sure that once you get your people in that you keep them and you’re staying top of mind with them.

Final thoughts

So those are just a few components of your overall digital marketing strategy. Our next vlogs, as I said, will be around how can you implement email marketing and content upgrades and boosted posts into your digital marketing strategy.

If you need help creating this strategy, if you need help with identifying your target market and really being clear on what your social media strategy should look like, we are here to help you.

Head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and schedule a free 30-minute consultation. We look forward to working with you. Have a great day.

June 24, 2020/by Amber Irwin

Customer Experience, Healthcare Marketing

Interview with Dr. Nick Kapustka on how to Build Relationships as a Chiropractor during COVID-19

Interview with Nick about Chiropratic care in covid

Dr. Nick graduated from Sherman College of Chiropractic in 2004 where he earned the honors of Magna Cum Laude and the Rising Star award given to a recent Sherman College graduate who has demonstrated exceptional achievements and service in the community. Dr. Nick’s focus on education came from growing up in a household with two amazing teachers as his parents. He has lectured both internationally and locally on a wide variety of health and life topics. Dr. Nick first learned about the importance of a healthy functioning body during an internship in a pediatric oncology unit in Madrid, Spain. From that point on, it was his mission to learn as much as possible to be able to help as many people as possible.

When Dr. Nick is away from the office, you will find him spending time with Dr. Rachel and their “magic man” of a son, Noah. He also enjoys spending time with friends, gardening, running, practicing American Sign Language, spending time in nature, reading, and playing basketball.

June 17, 2020/by Caitlin McDonald

Content Creation, Content Marketing, Social Media

5 Reasons You Need a Social Media Content Calendar

Social media has become an integral part of many businesses’ marketing strategy. It helps you connect with your audience, increase awareness about your brand, and generate more business.

With so many social media platforms to manage and publish in, it’s important to have a plan and stay organized for what and when you’re going to share on each platform. Having a social media content calendar will make things a lot easier.

What is a social media content calendar?

A social media calendar is a document that is used to plan out and organize future content. It allows you to visualize how your marketing looks like in the coming weeks or months and tweak any scheduled posts as necessary.

Content calendars can come in several forms. It can be a spreadsheet, hand-written calendar or a software. The purpose of a social media calendar is to provide a framework for scheduling out when and which content will be published across different social media channels.

A content calendar do wonders for your business. Here are 5 reasons why you need a social media content calendar.

Save time

You need to post regularly for your business to benefit from social media. But we all know that managing multiple social media accounts can be challenging, not to mention time consuming.

The purpose of using a content calendar is to help you plan out content ahead of time and schedule posts across multiple channels at once. With an effective calendar, you can schedule content weeks or months ahead of time. You no longer have to worry about falling behind if you become too busy or if something comes up.

A content calendar will not only help alleviate some of the day-to-day stressors, but it can also help you reach your long-term business goals. Freeing up more time, you can now focus on more important aspects of the business.

Never forget important dates

Holidays and other important events offer excellent opportunities to create engaging content. With a hectic schedule, it can be easy for important dates to slip your mind. Missing important dates can represent a lost opportunity.

An organized calendar helps reduce the chaos of scrambling to post it on time. Taking note of future events, you’ll have enough time to create the best possible content for the occasion instead of just churning out content at the last minute.

Having a content calendar alleviates the fear of forgetting important dates. Plus, it ensures that your content is being published when your audience is active.

Plan and organize your social media marketing strategy

Providing your audience with relevant, informative, and entertaining content is the key to keep your audience engaged.

When posting on social media, you want it to be a mix of industry news, inspiring content, content from others, and your own content. Using a content calendar allows you to visualize your content strategy over time. You’ll have plenty of time to fill it with relevant topics that resonate with your audience.

Without effective planning, you may run the risk of posting a topic that you have already discussed a few weeks ago. A social media content calendar will help you keep things in check, so you can avoid such blunders.

Brainstorm ideas

Instead of making last-minute decisions about what types of content to publish, you’ll have the advantage of getting feedback from your team members.

Every piece of content start with ideas, and you’ll need a lot of them to fill your calendar. When you plan out your social media content in advance, teams from different departments can contribute ideas, make edits, and plan future content.

They can use their knowledge to fill the space with relevant content that is valuable to your audience. Hence, you can be sure that you’re putting out the best and most relevant content.

Turn chaos into harmony

Collaboration with team members often lead to fresh ideas and greater return on investment. However, it can also be tricky to pull off efficiently. It can be further complicated by remote work.

A social media content calendar is a great way to collaborate. It can serve as a communication tool for the whole team. This is where topics, ideas, contents, and dates are placed. It helps keep every member of the team on the same page and stay on track of publishing.

Having a central place for different teams across your organization to manage social media content allows for a much smoother implantation of your social media marketing agenda.

June 10, 2020/by Kathlyn Angeles-Timbol

Pinterest and Tailwind Blog

Pinterest is one of those tools to build that website traffic, and a lot of people think of it as maybe not a tool that’s right for their business. Often, they think it’s just for recipes or interior design, which yes, it is used for that, but think of Pinterest as a visual search engine.

If your target audience is mostly women 35 to 65, Pinterest’s demographics are your target market! It’s time to see how you can use Pinterest to grow your business!

Pinterest for business

Pinterest is a great tool to use to get people to your website. And you think about when they go to Google what are they typing in? Especially moms, they’re going to Pinterest and they’re searching for different things.

I want to show you what a Pinterest business account looks like, and a tool that we use to manage our Pinterest. It’s really important to have that consistency and that strategy behind, “What are you pinning?” And so, this is where that digital marketing strategy that we’re always talking about comes into play.

Looking at what blogs are you writing. If you’re writing one blog per week or maybe two blogs per month, and they are the longer cornerstone blogs, each blog can have four to six images for that one blog, and you can pin those to Pinterest with links back to your website.

Difference between a personal and business account

Let me just dive in and show you a little bit about Pinterest. If you go sign up and create a Pinterest account, it will ask you if you’re business or personal.

Here we have our Social Speak Pinterest account, and this is the business account. I wanted to show you our profile.

Get access to the analytics dashboard

How you know that it’s a business account is because it will have analytics here. We have a little over 170,000 monthly viewers, which is pretty good for us. We really have worked hard on building our Pinterest account probably about the last year and a half.

We didn’t really take it too seriously before and now we’re seeing that traffic to the website really increase from what we’re putting on Pinterest. That’s a really good thing.

Set up an account with your business name

With a business account, you can set up your account with your business name. Here, we also have our logo. You can change your header images to a different static image. I always have the latest pins for our Social Speak board.

You could have in here a link to your website, a little bit about who you are and what you guys do, and then the most important thing is your boards.

Getting Started: Pinterest Basics

Create a board

You want to think of your boards as those keyword phrases. When you’re putting together your boards, it’s important to look at what are those key topics that you want to be talking about? So, you can have as many boards as you want. I always recommend starting with between five and seven, because you don’t want to be so overwhelmed. But as you continue to grow you’ll always be adding a new board, and so that’s okay, too.

We have different boards for different things, and these can be very specific. Obviously, content marketing strategy is our number one board with almost 800 pins. That and the health care digital marketing tips, those are our two main focuses.

It’s important to make sure that when you are creating a board that you are filling out the description. You want to make sure that you have the title of the board, the description of the board – fill out those blanks that Pinterest provides you. If people search for content marketing tips, then you are more likely to be able to show up here. That’s how that works.

Find and pin content

Now what I like to do is I like to follow certain brands and companies. For example, I really like CoSchedule. They put out some great content. We also utilize Sprout Social. They put out great content.

You can go-to activity and see what pins they have, the latest pins they’ve had. And then, you can either save them to the board that you want, or you can go into Tailwind, which I will get to in just a second.

I like to make sure that you know which brands you want to follow so you can re-pin from them. I love the image, and I think the content’s great. I’ll just click onto that image and look at the website, make sure that it’s something that I want our audience to click through to.

Track your performance to see what works

The most important thing is going to your Analytics. And again, this is just something to look at on a monthly basis. I always go to the overview, and then I look at the impressions, the total audience, the engagement. Any time this number is up, that’s a good thing.

In the past 30 days, we’ve had over 200,000 impressions which is up 36% from last month. We had 178,000 total audience engagement.

The number of engagements on your pins includes saves, close-ups. People that had either clicked onto one of the pins we put up, re-pinned them or liked them. And then your engaged audience is the number of people who had engaged with your pin directly. Meaning that they had liked it, or they had re-pinned it.

You can go down here and look at your top boards, and then you can also look at your top pins. So, we’re seeing that people looking for YouTube sizes and “Seven easiest ways to create Instagram content.” These are our top two pins that we had re-pinned, and people are finding them on our account and re-pinning them.

It’s good to really look at what content is working, so then you can make sure that you are utilizing that data to put more of that content out.

Why you should use Tailwind for Pinterest

Pinterest Automation

Pinterest can be sometimes a little bit of a time consumer. What we’ve used is this app called Tailwind.

Tailwind actually connects to your Pinterest and your Instagram. This is a paid program. It’s only $14.99 a month, I highly recommend it because this allows you to schedule pins out.

What this allows me to do is schedule all of my Pinterest posts for the month if I want to. I’ll just click on a pin, then hit Add to Queue, and it’s going to automatically put it into my queue where it feels it needs to go.

Post inspector

What’s really cool about this, when you are on Pinterest and you click just onto the Home button, it doesn’t tell you how many times this pin had been re-pinned, but on Tailwind it does. So this has been re-pinned 115 times. And again, sometimes things will come up that are not aligned with your business, and that’s okay. You just scroll past them, but you can look to see which ones are getting more pins.

For example, I click on Instagram Strategy. Tailwind shows that this was re-pinned 341 times, and it’ll tell you that it’s 299 times on Pinterest and 42 times on Facebook.

Smart Schedule

With Tailwind, it organizes your posts based on when your audience is on Pinterest, and when you are getting the most engagement. That’s the one thing I love about Tailwind is it’s easy to be able to find that content. You can see the source right here. You can pick as many boards as you want, and then if you don’t like the content, if you don’t like those posts, you would just click More Suggestions, and more suggestions will come up.

Tailwind just helps keep everything organized. And that’s what I really like because it saves you time and it gives you the post that you’re looking for, it gives you the data on what the popularity is, and it also just helps with the Auto-Schedule.

Smart Loop

The other thing you can do with Tailwind is what’s called a smart loop. Now, this is great for your blog posts that are your cornerstone blogs, meaning those are 2000 plus blogs.

We’ve already used our 250 smart loops and what that means is it will pull all of these blogs that we’ve done from a year, two years, three years ago, and it’s going to keep populating them. So it will automatically schedule those out into our plan, and because I’ve said I want these blogs to be scheduled to these certain boards, it will do that.

Schedule Instagram videos

I highly recommend utilizing Pinterest and Tailwind together, you can get the most benefit out of your Pinterest account. You could also publish videos on here as well, that’s a great tool because videos are awesome on Pinterest, and it’s just a great way to really monitor what’s working.

Analytics

On your Google Analytics, you would be able to tell how many people have come to your website from Pinterest. That’s a great way to monitor those analytics.

Is your social media marketing strategy sorted out?

If you need help with creating this strategy for your Pinterest account and utilizing Tailwind and just elevating your digital marketing strategy as a whole, we do offer a free 30-minute consultation. That allows us to get to know what your goals are, what are you struggling with, and what are you wanting to accomplish with your digital marketing. And then we can put up a plan together moving forward from there.

We also just launched our online VIP community, and that’s a monthly membership that allows you to see different handouts, tutorials, trainings on all different things in digital marketing. It’s a great starting point if you are wanting to do things on your own. If you really need help with that next step with your digital marketing strategy, go to socialspeaknetwork.com and click on the “Contact Us” button for a free 30-minute consultation. If you have any questions, please let us know.

June 3, 2020/by Amber Irwin

Connecting with Customers, Customer Experience

How to Shift Yoga Practice Amid COVID-19

Introducing Buffalo + Sparrow Yoga Collective with Cole and Rachel.

We founded Buffalo and Sparrow Yoga Collective in 2017 when we realized we both share a passion to make yoga more accessible to people affected by trauma (which we believe is everyone). Yoga, when taught through the lens of trauma sensitivity, can be an important part of a treatment program for individuals with PTSR (Post Traumatic Stress Response) and all individuals benefit from connecting deeply to themselves. Through this perspective. we hope to create yoga environments where individuals feel safe and supported as they witness their trauma symptoms and learn tools within yoga to self-regulate when those symptoms present. Our dream is for everyone experiencing trauma symptoms to have the ability to live life as their whole self… free from trauma symptoms. We believe that yoga, when taught with intentionality around trauma, can support in this journey.

We deeply strive to stay culturally aware, up-to-date on the most current trauma research and yoga findings as well as being as inclusive, aware, informed and sensitive as possible. Our offerings are for everyone! Every background, experience, culture, identity, gender and being is welcome!

We also understand many folks might feel more comfortable in their healing process when learning and sharing space with those in their own affinity groups. If this is the case for you, please head over to our collaborators tab to learn more about where to to go in order to support yourself in the safest way.

May 20, 2020/by Caitlin McDonald

Digital Marketing, Social Media, Social Speak

Social Media Overview and Scheduling Tools

Today, I want to talk about looking at your social media strategy in the big picture. A lot of the questions that we get a lot are, “How do I schedule my social media post? Where do I schedule my social media post? And how do I really just organize my social media post?” And so we’ve done a few videos on this with creating that content calendar and making sure that your posts are organized. And I just wanted to walk you through how we do it on our side, and then also show you a couple of the scheduling tools that we utilize for ourselves and our clients.

Content calendar template

So one thing that we’ve done is a content calendar template. The biggest thing with social media is making sure you are consistent and you have a plan. Most of the time, we get so caught up in work that we forget about what we want to talk about on social media, and whether you’re doing your social media internally, or you have a team like us that’s managing your social media. It’s important to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Contents ideas for your social media posts:

Blog post – You can share your most recent blog post.
Share a tip from weekly blog post with a link back to the blog or website – You can pull information from a past blog
Visual image with logo on it – It can be a motivational quote or tip of the day. You can create that in Canva.
Article or blog from outside source – Share articles from other like-minded sources. You want to remember that 80/20 rule
Product from website linking back to the page – If you have products or different services that are on the website, you can link back to those.

Switch up the content

What I like to do is the information, the post that go on to Facebook and LinkedIn, I think it’s okay if it’s the same content. I would swap the days, and then I would change around the content for Instagram. So maybe what you used on a Tuesday for a Facebook and LinkedIn post, you can reword it, add some bullet points, add in some hashtags and use it for Instagram maybe the following week. So you want to keep that content going, you can utilize it on other platforms.

I do not recommend putting the same post out at the same day, same time to all networks. It doesn’t give any value. We found that most people that follow you on Facebook are also following you on Instagram. So if you’re posting the same thing the same day, there’s no value there. So you want to be able to switch up that content. And having some type of a monthly overview, we found that to have really helped us and our clients kind of know what topics are coming next. So this is kind of that monthly overview.

Content resources

Now it’s time to write the content. So on the social media calendar, you’ll have different topics that you want to talk about.

You’ll have content resources – different websites for that curated content, the like-minded websites that you’re looking for, maybe it’s newsletters that you’re a part of – put them in here. This is supposed to be an easy place that you can just go and pull an article from the source you’ve already approved, your team has access to it.

Google sheet

You’ll notice this is all done in a Google Sheet. The reason we use a Google Sheet is because this is a platform that everyone has access to. So I can share this Google calendar with my team. And so the person that’s writing the social media posts, the person that needs to approve them, they know what’s going out.

It keeps everyone together on one platform rather than having to log into something or download, if someone has a Mac and someone has a PC, from Excel to whatever, it’s just too complicated. I like things simple and very clear. So we use Google Sheets for that.

Here, we have the content resources, we have blog topics, so this can be where we organize our blogs for the month so we know what’s going out.

Creating a content calendar

Google sheet

There are two things you can do here. Now that we know what we’re talking about for the month, we need to have a place of where we can write those social media topics.

One thing that we have done is you can, say here like the date, platform, content, image. Now the other thing that we’ve done is instead of doing this, we may say the date and then we’ll say Instagram copy, Facebook copy, LinkedIn copy, and then we’ll either say image, and then on here we’ll put hashtags as well. You can also place the key code, and then you can pull from the content calendar.

So you can change up, you can create this however it works best for you. We’ve seen a lot of different techniques on creating where you’re gonna write your social media post.

It can be blog title and first paragrah. Now obviously, you are going to put that content in here. You’re gonna have the link in here, and then the image, you can actually go to Insert, and then go to Image, and upload the image directly into this sheet.

So this is one way to keep it all in one place to be able to see, “Okay, this is going onto Instagram, this is going out onto Facebook and LinkedIn. Here’s the images that needs to go out to there, the hashtags.”

So for writing, I always like to write posts a week or two weeks or three weeks in advance. So we have our date here, so we would say Monday, then we can have Tuesday, and then through Friday, and have the copy on one sheet.

Google doc

The other way that we have seen it done is through a Google Doc. And this can be the same thing. This can be a week – May 4th to 8th. You can do a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And if you post on Saturday and Sunday, great.

You can insert your copy here and your images as well. Now, one thing that I would do is make sure that you are utilizing your images, you’re creating your images in the social media template in Canva, so they show up nicely on all platforms.

So you know that Monday, May 4th for Facebook and LinkedIn, this is the copy that’s gonna go out to those two platforms. So it’s really figuring out what works best for you.

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Now let’s get into the scheduling tools. Some people like to just go directly into those scheduling tools. They have the overview of the content calendar and they say, “Okay, this is what my month will look like,” and then they go right into the scheduling tools and write their content directly in there. And that’s totally fine too. It’s just figuring out that process that works best for you.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a paid service. The one thing I really like about them is I love that they do monthly reports. So that gives you your activity for whatever platform you have that you’re utilizing on here. It gives you an overview of exactly what posts you have going out.

When you come over here to publishing, it will pop up what posts you have already scheduled for the month, the week, so it’s very clear, and then you can see each platform right here. If you go to compose, you can upload up to four pictures through Sprout Social, which is good because you like to have multiple photos on the different networks. Here, you can drop down and you can click the platforms that you want it to go to.

One really cool thing about this as well is it has this option for Instagram, the Instagram first comment. So a lot of people will have their Instagram content, and then that first comment is where they put in their 30 hashtags. So that’s a really cool feature that Sprout Social has, and then it will preview what your post will look like. Again, if you have Twitter on here, you want make sure you do Twitter separately because of that 280-character count. Now, with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, it will show 1,300. So it gives you that option, if you take off LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram 2,200. So it gives you that option. So you can go right directly into here, write your post, and then you can go to choose a date, time, and schedule it. So that’s one way of being able to just utilize a dashboard like this and be able to have all your posts in one area.

So I really like Sprout Social because of how user-friendly it is, and you’re able to see what you have scheduled. And some days you’re gonna have posts for certain networks that you just wanna go out and not for the other networks, and that’s totally okay. So just, again, figuring out that strategy for you. You can do drafts in here. With Sprout Social, it does automatically post to Instagram, which is another bonus. So it will actually post whatever post is here to your Instagram account.

Hootsuite

The second tool I want to show you is called Hootsuite. Hootsuite has a free version and a paid version. And I believe it’s still free for one or two social media platforms.

Hootsuite also schedules and posts directly to Instagram, which is great, because Instagram I feel is the social media platform that is the most manual because they didn’t have a scheduling tool before. So in here, you’ll have streams, which I really like how these streams.

Besides the reporting of Sprout Social, I love Hootsuite as a overview piece, because I can see what posts have gone out, what mentions people have mentioned us in, what activity, if people have posted to our page or what we’ve put up, what messages we have. And then we can also put on here our scheduled, unpublished, so you can go in here and again, write drafts and be able to see, organize everything in here, and it would show up like this for your scheduled ones.

So I really like Hootsuite because I do think it’s very simple to use. Again, you would go to New Post and you would type in your content, you can upload your image, videos. You’ll just click here to select the platform you want it to go to, the media you want, your text. And I really like this feature. So this is Hootsuite. Again, very simple, very user-friendly.

Buffer

The third one is called Buffer. I think they do have a free plan. It’s still very similar to the other two scheduling tools. It will tell you what you have going out. It can give you some analytics.

Now, with Buffer, it does not automatically post to Instagram. It will give you a notification on your mobile device that you have a post, and then you would need to go into your Instagram and push that post out.

So Buffer is a great tool, there’s a lot you can do with it. Like I said, it does give you some analytics. And we’ll look at the Instagram stories, strategy recommendations, and obviously that is for the paid package, but it does provide a lot of details.

When it comes to a publishing tool, it’s really a personal preference of which one aesthetically you like, which one will be the best for you and your team. And if you choose not to use a Google Doc or a Google Sheet to organize your posts and you choose to use just a platform like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, you want make sure, again, if it’s not just you doing your social media post, you want to make sure that it’s user-friendly for you and your team.

Bonus tool: Grammarly

One thing that I’ve also installed is a plugin called Grammarly.

Grammarly works on:

Google docs
Hootsuite
Buffer
Sprout Social

I like it because it adds that extra layer of making sure that your posts are grammatically correct going out, which is important. If you put in a misspelling, it usually highlights the spelling mistake. I will go like, this doesn’t make sense, and then you can click on it, and then it will either to give you a word, “Hey, what did you mean to say here?”

Mistakes happen. It’s not a life or death thing. And I also think that with social media, having that strategy is really good because it will allow you to stop and think about what your plan is and paying attention to those details and making sure when you’re creating the images in Canva.

Final thoughts

We go back to that brand consistency that we’ve talked about. So this is just giving you the overview of your social media strategy, looking at thinking of a month at a time with your social media posts, how many times per week do you want to post, and then what’s the action you’re going to take to create those posts, and then be able to schedule them out?

There’s tons of other tools out there. These are just three scheduling tools that we have used and we enjoy using. And there’s a lot of different content strategies out there, but again, it’s finding the one that works best for you.

So if you need help creating that strategy and putting together that content calendar and getting one of these scheduling tools set up, we are here to help you.

May 6, 2020/by Amber Irwin

Healthcare Marketing, Social Media

How to Maximize Your Social Media Presence During the Pandemic

The unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak has holed up a huge chunk of the global population in their homes. It has created a healthcare crisis alongside an economic crisis. Unfortunately, no one seems to be able to say when the COVID-19 outbreak will end.

With emotions high, it is important now more than ever to put extra thought into what messages you share with your target audience.

Here are 6 ways healthcare providers can maximize their social presence during the COVID-19 crisis.

Educate your audience

Studies suggest that nearly 66% of internet users get their news online, specifically from social media.

Information is powerful and can help save people’s lives, especially during this pandemic.

COVID-19 cases have surged across the globe, so does the number of people searching for information about the virus. People need answers to questions like:

What are the symptoms of COVID-19?
How will I know when it is time to seek help at a hospital?
Should I stay home if the symptoms are minor?
Where can I get tested?
How do I avoid infecting others?

As a healthcare professional, you have enormous potential to educate your community. Your first step would be to provide answers to combat those concerns. Write a blog or record a video, and then post it on your social media page.

Beyond the fact that it is the right thing to do, sharing valuable, accurate information can help you grow your authority and build your organization’s thought leadership.

Counteract misinformation

Living in the digital world, information is just a mouse-click away. This free information age is a good thing. Unfortunately, false information is rampant, especially on social media. Some people who see them may think what they are reading is actually true, and that could be harmful. Worse, people are sharing “fake news” to their family and friends.

In a step in the right direction, WHO has launched a chatbot on Facebook Messenger to combat COVID-19 misinformation. The WHO Health Alert was developed in an effort to provide instant and accurate information about COVID-19. This movement aims to help people understand the facts related to the disease, protect themselves from COVID-19, and prevent its spread.

Counteract misinformation by sharing factual, accurate information about what is currently known about COVID-19. Another option is to share blog posts from trusted sources such as the CDC and WHO.

Encourage social distancing

Despite the surge of COVID-19 cases across the globe, a lot of people still underestimate the seriousness of the virus.

At this point in time, people’s safety is a top priority. You can use social media to help people understand that this is absolutely serious. Globally, more than 2.25 million people have been diagnosed with the virus, and more than 170,000 have died.

Use your voice to convince people to comply with social distancing, stay at home, and consequently help flatten the curve.

Take every opportunity to engage

With COVID-19 sending people indoors for more hours than they’re used to, many of them are relying on social media to stay in touch with family and friends, consume news, and entertainment.

Your fans and followers are spending more time online than they ever have before, and you want to stay connected to them. Take this opportunity to engage with your audience and deepen your relationship with them.

Social media is a great place to start a conversation, inspire, and spread the good news. Get in front of the camera and talk to your audience. People need hope. They want to see that there is a reason to smile. We all know that it is a difficult time, but you want to continue to uplift and inspire your followers.

By answering questions and concerns, as well as providing updates about patient recoveries and treatment options, you are acting as a resource to those who are anxious and could use some extra help to get through this difficult time.

You still have to comply with HIPAA

There are no dedicated HIPAA social media rules. But as a medical practitioner, you still have to comply with HIPAA regulations.

You must protect the privacy of your patients at all times. That means you should never include information that can be used to identify individual’s patients or their medical records. This includes name, photos, date of birth, medical data, social security number, etc.

Consider telemedicine

Living under lockdown conditions while a pandemic encircles the globe can be difficult. As basic supplies go short and some healthcare professionals get diverted to COVID-19 wards, some patients are struggling to get treatment.

Integrating telemedicine to your practice means being able to see patients who need routine checkups without risking a visit to a medical office. Instead of leaving the house and sitting in a waiting room full of other vulnerable patients, patients can get the care they need at the comfort of their homes.

April 29, 2020/by Kathlyn Angeles-Timbol

Inbound Marketing, Website Management

Why Digital Marketing is Essential for Healthcare

It is simply not possible to run a business without marketing irrespective of the niche you are attached to. People only buy products and services from a brand when they know that it exists. Healthcare is not an exception and interaction with current / new patients is needed. The end to end process of marketing is not the same which it was five to ten years back. This is the digital marketing era and people use the internet to follow up on everything. Online trend for buying products / offered services is increasing and people want to make every purchase from the comfort of their home.

Here are some core factors which show why digital marketing plays a strong important role in the healthcare business.

1. In-depth patient analytics

If you are a part of the health industry, you would be concentrating on a certain sector. For instance, if you run a company that produces oxygen masks, the targeted patients would be people suffering from lung disorders and asthma. However, when it comes to offering correct treatment options, accurate diagnosis is highly important.

For instance, if you are infected with cancer, the treatment would be prescribed after your medical details are interpreted through health calculators. These online tools come in handy as they assess the medical condition of patient on behalf of key parameters. How can you access these tools? You can search for them online and several options would be shown. One of these websites that offers quality health calculators is Calculators.tech.

Apart from core medical diagnosis through online tools, digital marketing contributes majorly towards patient analytics. For instance, by using a keyword planning tool, you can see what people requiring medical assistance are searching for when they end up on your website. This would provide an insight about who searches for the services you offer. By using keyword optimization techniques, you can get more searches successfully directed.

2. Catering to online health care requirements

Healthcare companies and hospitals have changed the way they deal with patients. Everything is accessed and used online. For instance, is someone has fever, he would browse a health app or search for an online medical center. These days, hospitals store the patient data through EMR (electronic medical records) on cloud based servers so that they can be accessed at anytime from anywhere.

The important thing is making your patients know what you are offering in terms of care? Digital marketing is the best way to accomplish this goal since people access websites and social media pages to gather information. Thus, healthcare companies have to be sure that all their services are known. It is important to understand that most patients have the opinion that a lot of difference does not exist between heath care providers. For them, every brand does nothing unique but produce treatment options.

3. Working on specific health sectors through digital promotion

The human body requires medical treatment for different areas. Someone who is suffering from cancer would get in touch with a company that specializes in making related drugs. How would the patient know which health care provider to select? He would select an option which is popular and a lot of people know about it.

If you are specializing in a certain category of services, through digital marketing, you would be able to each the desired audience. To sell medical products, you should know who the potential buyers will be. This task is achieved through effective digital promotion. For instance, you can create social media posts regarding a new vaccine for Hepatitis. People who would be interested will get in touch with you and generate queries. This will provide you with details about who wants to buy the vaccine. In addition to that, you would know about the medical profiles of people who need it.

4. Reach patients on a global scale

A lot of healthcare companies operate globally and wish reach people residing in different locations. Medical products are meant to treat diseases and all categories are not available in each country. Consider that someone living in Africa is suffering from a unique form of eczema and there is no treatment drug available there. How would that person reach you if you have a product to handle this issue? It is obvious that he would not roam in different countries to see which health companies can fulfill his need.

A lot of people opt for online ordering of medicines. In such cases, healthcare brands that have a strong digital marketing strategy prove to be successful. For instance, if a company has a good informative website ranked on the first page, getting orders from different parts of the world will not be a problem.
Why is digital promotion better than using conventional standard marketing methods to reach patients? The reason is the set of practices which people follow to find medical services. No one has the time to read through books and medical journals to see what’s available. These days, people even use Google to know about pain killers. If a healthcare firm has all its produces properly categorized and listed, people would not have to spend time on unnecessary searching. In a nutshell, effective digital marketing helps in understanding the needs of the patients and entertaining them in a timely manner.

5. The best way to gather patient requirements quickly

Marketing a product / set of services digitally works well because it is quick and potential patients are reached in a very fast way. In addition to that, the response from them is fast as well. Someone who is interested in surgical instruments would get in touch with you by dropping a message on your Facebook account if the page provides relevant information. Hence, this form of marketing produces much quicker results than promoting products through paper brochures.

Conclusion

Digital marketing has changed the face of product promotion and is a necessity for all sectors. Healthcare is definitely not an exception in this case. Companies dealing in these products have to know about the targeted patients. These days, the face of any service provider is the website and social media presence it has. If someone wants to select a healthcare brand, he would glance at the top rated websites. In this case, the top rated links would do the job.

There are several parameters which show why it has a major impact on the health sector. For instance, it helps in promoting EMR services. The most reputed healthcare companies store these records on cloud based servers so that they can be retrieved without any obstacle.

April 22, 2020/by Caitlin McDonald

Healthcare Marketing, Website Marketing

Ty Allen SocialClimb Interview

Today we’re going to be joined by Ty Allen, the CEO of SocialClimb. SocialClimb is Ty’s fourth successful business in the marketing and technology space. He is passionate about building systems that actually grow practices and improve patient experiences.

SocialClimb enables thousands of physicians to automatically attract new patients to their practices by building their online social reputations and automatically targeting ideal new patients. Delivering more than one million patient per customer interactions every month, SocialClimb helps practices transform themselves inside and out.

Ty and his wife have five beautiful daughters and live in Alpine, Utah. Ty enjoys golfing, and mountain biking, and we’re so excited for him to be joining us today as he shares insights into how your medical practice can benefit from reputation management, and reviews, and directory listings online.

In this interview we discuss:

Why reviews are so important for a medical practice
Where reviews should be posted (what directories are most important for healthcare)?
How can office administrators solicit reviews?
What technology exists for getting reviews?
Once you get a review, what should you do?

Listen to the Medical Marketing Podcast:

Caitlin McDonald: Wonderful, thank you so much, Ty for joining us on our podcast today. To get started, we’d love to learn a little bit more about your story, and SocialClimb’s story.

Ty Allen: Great, thanks, Caitlin, I really appreciate the opportunity to participate in the podcast today, and maybe just to share a little bit about why we started SocialClimb and the reasons we’re so passionate about what we do for practices, is I think a great way to start.

So, my personal story behind this is six years ago, I was involved in an accident wherein I fractured my neck and at C4, and had a spinal cord injury. At the time of the injury, of course, I didn’t know what had really happened in my neck. The ambulance took me to the hospital, and the emergency room doctors did a great job, they quickly diagnosed my issue, and they knew that the fracture was there, and that I also had what is called a central cord syndrome.

And at that level in the neck, I was pretty lucky that I was still able to breathe. But when I first had been injured, I actually felt like I was a quadriplegic and then over the next half an hour, I started getting some sensation back and some functionality back, but I was actually in a lot of pain by the time they got me to the emergency room. So I remember vividly laying on a backboard after the doctors had gotten the diagnosis, and they came to me and said that my case was too complex for the small hospital that I’d been taken to and that I needed to either go to a larger hospital north of me or a larger hospital south of me, and the ER doctor said, “These are the names of the two physicians, spine surgeons, who are on call, one at each of the hospitals. I need you to choose which hospital, therefore which spine surgeon is going to do your surgery. You have five minutes to make that decision.”

And my wife was at the hospital at that time and I remember looking at her and neither of us had any idea how to make that decision. Eventually, we made the decision by asking a few other providers who were very reticent to give us any information, but we had to make a decision so we did. And in my process of rehab, so I had surgery, I went into a rehab process that… I was in the hospital for about a month, and went through inpatient and outpatient rehab and… And I’m doing very well today, in a large part to the great care that I received from a lot of providers

But there were probably eight to 10 decisions I had to make during that process about who would be my occupational therapist, who’d be my physical therapist, what inpatient facility would I have myself go to, what outpatient facilities would I use for rehab, who my rehab doctor would be, and just a lot of decisions that I just, as a consumer of Medical care, I did not have the data to make that decision.

So I realized, while, going through this process that there was a problem, that a lot of these practices and physicians don’t know how to tell their story in a way that consumers of medical care today can use it to find the right provider for them. So that’s where the genesis of SocialClimb came from.

We’re really passionate about helping providers, great providers, tell their story, and attract patients in the way that patients seek to find providers today. And that is the story behind SocialClimb. And again, it’s not a story I always tell every potential customer, or every person I talk to, but it is the reason that I personally am so passionate about what we do.

Caitlin McDonald: What a powerful story, and thank you for sharing such a personal story about why you started SocialClimb. And as a consumer of healthcare and a marketing agency that helps healthcare practices, we know how important reputation management and reviews are as a way to build trust and really showcase your own medical practice story as a way to bring new patients in the door. Can you talk a little bit about why reviews and reputation management is so important for healthcare centers?

Why are Reviews and Reputation Management so Important for Healthcare Centers?

Ty Allen: Sure, yeah. One of the things that I learned pretty quickly is that I’m not unique in the way that I seek for care, when I wanna buy a product, I take my phone out and do a search. I go to Amazon or Google and I do a search. And I do the same thing for medical care. Today, it’s a great thing that now we have a lot of this data available to us online. But it wasn’t the case even six years ago, a lot of it wasn’t available

So getting a physician or practice’s data online in the right way, so getting the listings, the optimization of those listings, and the reviews from real patients out there is super critical because the next potential patient is simply gonna take their phone out and do a search, they’re gonna ask Google in most cases, “Where can I get help with problem X? Or where can I find a provider that can help me with problem Y?

And if those reviews from patients are not out there, and if those pages are not owned by you as a physician, you are not gonna show up. Even five or six years ago, most practices and physicians thought, “Look, all I gotta do is get a website set up. My website has to be great, it’s gotta be optimized.” And it’s not to say that websites are not still valuable, it’s just that so many patients today do a search, find a physician because of their reputation online, choose that physician, even make the call to the practice straight from that listing, having never gone to the practice’s website. So a website is still valuable. It’s just that there are so many other ways to now tell the story of the practice, and the physician online in ways that patients actually find… Help find your practice.

Caitlin McDonald: And then where should these reviews be posted? What types of directories should a medical practice make sure that they are on?

What Directories Should a Medical Practice Use?

Ty Allen: Great, great question. So four years ago, when we first started this, we saw a lot of emphasis on a lot of different platforms, right. You’d hear people say, “There’s 70 different platforms that you should put your listings on and make sure they’re all correct.” And at the time that may have been a bit true. But today it’s coalescing. So we really think that Google is 80% of the value for a practice. Google is the focus. So, Google My Business pages for each doctor and each office location. In fact, if a physician practices in multiple locations, they really should have a Google My Business page in each location where they practice if they’re more than five miles apart, because local search is what’s going on here. When Google does a local search, it’s very first local.

So a great reputation downtown for a physician does not help somebody in the suburbs find that physician, but if that physician works two days a week out in the suburbs, having a strong reputation out there is really important on Google. Now, Google used to kind of be just the judge.

By that I mean you would do a search and Google would say, “Well, HealthGrades ranks this physician this way, and Facebook does this, and Vitals says this, and RateMDs says this, and Facebook says, or Yelp says this.”

And so, that summation of data from all those other areas would pull into the search for Google. We’ve seen a trend over the last few months, or… Sorry, a year, year and a half that Google is now the judge and the jury. So, Google seems to trust its own data on its own listing’s pages for doctors and practices, more than it trusts that third party data. So when a practice has done a good job helping Google understand that it does find work for patients by getting reviews from patients and optimizing pages on Google, then the Google results reflect that.

So we would say Google, number one. Facebook has some really interesting ways, with Facebook… The way that your patients can go on and they don’t necessarily leave reviews in a traditional way, that they are kind of recommendations. Yelp is often important. HealthGrades is very important. So, probably Google, Facebook, HealthGrades, Vitals and Yelp are the top platforms, that we see really having an influence on how patients find physicians.

Caitlin McDonald: So you mentioned Google has become judge and the jury for their own organization of those listings, do you feel as though they take a look at onsite SEO or is it really just looking at your Google My Business listing, seeing if that’s optimized and kind of seeing what reviews you have there?

What Do You Need to Have on Google My Business Listing to Stand Out as a Medical Center?

Ty Allen: Yeah, we see that they do both, actually. So we see that the link from your Google My Business page where you’re connecting basically to a doctor’s profile or to a practice’s profile on the website, if that link goes to a page, that has the same keywords that are in the doctor’s profile and in the doctor’s category on the Google My Business page, we see those pages rank more highly. So it is still very important to have a highly ranking website that you can link to from the Google My Business pages, so that the page, the Google page ranks higher, and if you get those keyword… Kind of that keyword triangle set up correctly, if the category chosen on the Google My Business page, those same keywords from that category on the physician’s profile page on the website, and those keywords also included in the business description on the physician’s Google My Business page, we see a nice synergy there that causes Google My Business pages to rank higher.

Caitlin McDonald: Okay, that makes sense. I can see how it all works together there. Now, are you recommending that in addition to having the medical practice have a Google My Business page, that each of the physicians have their own Google My Business page, as well?

Physician Google My Business Listings

Ty Allen: We do recommend that, yes. We’ve seen policy change from Google on that, and we’ve seen it become a really valuable way for a practice to attract patients. Now sometimes a practice doesn’t wanna do that and they wanna just promote their practice as a brand and they don’t really want their physicians to be front and center, and sometimes they’re worried that those physicians will then take that reputation and leave, and it doesn’t strengthen the partnership in the practice, but honestly, it’s more valuable in the search process if a practice will embrace the concept of each of the providers, each of the doctors, we don’t typically recommend this for PAs or nurse practitioners or even PTs, but the doctors themselves, having their own Google My business page, as well as the practice having a Google My Business page, that gives that practice more footprint in the market to attract patients and making those pages highly optimized is also very important.

So when we say that, we believe there are 10 key components on a Google My Business page that really help it rank highly, so when our platform actually sinks a Google page in, it runs a scorecard analysis on each of those components, so the optimization score, and that is completely independent of the number of reviews. We actually see that a page can ranks more highly without any reviews if all the components on a Google My business page are properly configured. Then, of course, you add reviews to that, you add postings, you answer and respond to questions that get posted by patients, you reply to reviews, you do all those great things on a Google My Business page, and it just moves it higher and higher and higher, but the first step is claim a page for each doc in each location, optimize those pages, and then start the process of building a reputation.

Caitlin McDonald: Great, so it sounds as though an office administrator has quite a bit of work or they can turn to a service like yours to help them with this. So, what could an office administrator do to make sure that that they are soliciting reviews from patients?

How to Solicit Reviews from Patients

Ty Allen: Yeah, so the basics, and as you said, this can all be done manually. If an administrator has the time, they can go and claim the pages, go through each of the pages and get the pictures, the configuration, the hours, the description, the links to the website, get all of that stuff done, that’s all very doable. You can use Google’s interfaces to do that, to manage these Google My Business pages. And then once you’ve done that, you can say print a little card and hand it out to each of the patients. And on that card it has a link that they could type into their phone or into their computer and click that link and go out and leave a review for the doctor.

All very doable, and something that we highly recommend practices consider doing. Typically what we find is most practice managers or marketing people, or front desk people, and these practices are already overworked. So our approach to this is to automate all of that process. So I’ve already talked through claiming the page, optimizing the page, all those things, but let’s talk about how the best way to get patients to leave feedback.

So we’ve seen groups do everything from putting a computer in the lobby and asking patients to walk up to that computer, log in to their personal accounts on that computer and then leave a review for a doctor, to some groups, even as I said, handing out a card and hoping patients will take the card home and type that long URL in, and then get to a review page. So, most of those things can work, they’re just not as effective as actually sending a message, automated message, via text to each of the patients. So we actually recommend a text message that goes to the patients that has a nice link on it, a picture from the doctor, and an invitation for the patient to easily click the link, leave a review, typically a patient can do that in about 30 seconds.

The beauty of that process versus the other two that I just talked about, is those patients receive that text message or email on their phone typically, and when they click the link to leave feedback on Google or Facebook or one of these platforms they’re typically are already authenticated to Google, maybe they already have the Facebook app on their phone, that it opens into Facebook. So make it so that it’s so easy that they could do it in less than one minute, and then you actually get in a high enough response rate that you can really move the needle on the reputation.

There’s a couple of other problems I would point out when you try to do it more manually, is you hand somebody a card. It’s a complex URL, the chances of them actually doing it go way down, they’re not gonna type that in and go through that process. And if you ask them to do it in your lobby on a computer, they’ve gotta remember their passwords to log in, then you’ve gotta remember to make sure that that thing gets logged out so you’re not sharing personal data, so the next patient who might walk up to it. But then the worst thing about that option is if you’re making those reviews, many of them from the same computer, on the same IP address, the platforms start to throw those away, the review platforms start to ignore those because they know they’re coming from one IP address and they think they’re fraudulent. So, the most efficient thing to do is to get a message to a patient, on their phone that they can easily click and move through the review process as quickly as possible.

Caitlin McDonald: Now SocialClimb as a platform, this is exactly what you do. We have some clients who utilize SocialClimb and it is very straightforward, and very easy for patients to leave those reviews. Honestly, within a couple of hours of turning on the packages with you, we have as marketing managers of Google My Business pages, we have seen reviews come in, when prior to that, maybe one per month would come in.

And it really is making that process easy and simple for the patients as they’re leaving the practice, they get that text message notification. It’s top of mind and that ease of use is just right in their face. So it does make it very easy and streamlined to get those reviews.

Ty Allen: Well that’s great to hear that it’s worked well for your client like that. We see that with a lot of groups and as you pointed out, previous to making an effort like this, to invite patients, you typically only get one or two reviews, very few a month, and really unfortunately, they’re often the patient who wants to complain. So, what we’re really doing is enabling that silent majority of happy patients who walk away from a cycle of care with a practice, or a physician, who are very happy, right, they’re the happiest of the patients, but they don’t turn around and say thank you.

They don’t think about it, they’re not passionate about saying, “Thank you,” like a person who’s mad is passionate about saying they’re mad. So what we’re really trying to do is get 10%, that’s the goal, 10% of the happy patients, and we’re asking every patient whether they’re happy or not. Let’s talk about that in just a second. But, get 10% of those happy patients to turn around and say thank you by leaving a social media review for that practice or that doctor. And that adds up really fast and really makes a practice look… Or a physician look great online, because they typically are making 99% of their patients extremely happy.

And we ask those questions, when we invite a patient, we do not gate them. We don’t say, “Hey if you’re happy, leave a public review, if you’re unhappy, don’t do anything or leave a private review.” We ask the question per the policy of most of these review platforms to just invite everyone to leave feedback. The reality is most unhappy patients, given a chance, if you’re asking them how their experience was, they’ll actually turn around and wanna tell you without giving you a bad name online.

So, our process is, “Would you please leave feedback at these public review sites?” If they say yes, they’re taken to the public review sites, if they say no, they’re given an opportunity to say something that comes right back to the practice. So that’s the way to appropriately invite patients to leave feedback, and we typically see that great care providers get great reputations online through this process.

Caitlin McDonald: Now, one thing that across all industries, by opening up yourself to getting reviews online do is that you are opening yourself to get bad reviews. And one thing that’s always good to do, especially in the medical industry, is to think about what those responses are going to be for those negative reviews as well as positive reviews as commenting back on any review that you get can help show that you are also an active participant, and really care about your patients. Do you have any tips or insights about how to go about formulating those responses to negative reviews specifically?

Ty Allen: Yes. So your point is very, very accurate from my opinion. You wanna respond to any and all reviews. Really, we recommend that a practice responds to all the positive reviews, thank those patients. That is a courteous thing to do in normal human interactions. It’s also a very positive thing to do from Google’s perspective. If you’re getting lots of reviews and you’re actually responding to the reviews, you actually then rank higher. Getting a lot of reviews is great but getting a lot of reviews, that you respond to seems to cause your pages to rank even higher. So, our positive reviews, it’s an easy thing. We actually have a suite of replies, both positive and negative, that are built into our platform that are HIPAA compliant, that we recommend that a practice use.

So now let’s talk about negative feedback. So when you do get negative feedback, our suggestion is to think of it in two ways. First off, you wanna get this conversation offline. So you wanna reply in a respectful way that asks the patient to contact you privately so you can have that conversation offline, and you wanna do that so that everyone can see that you’re proactively and quickly responding to negative feedback. So, you don’t wanna wait a month, you don’t even wanna wait a day. If you get a negative review, you wanna reply within minutes to hours, and then you wanna get that conversation offline, and that helps the next patient who comes along that looks at your feedback then understands that sometimes things do happen

Something out of your control can happen but you care as a practice, and so you respond quickly. And then when you get that patient into a service recovery opportunity, which is what we recommend how you think of these, we actually have a process in our platform that makes it easy for you to track what you’ve done there, make notes on it, share it with your team and even build a little process around it, so that everybody in the organization understands what you got feedback on that didn’t work and that kind of socializes within your organization and also shows how many of those have been resolved.

So when the physician looks through all the feedback, positive and negative, that’s come in for them throughout that month or that week, they can see that anything negative has actually been dealt with or is in the process of being dealt with. So you have several different constituents you’re worried about here. Of course, you are worried about the patient, and responding to them, but as an administrator, you also want to make sure that your physician understands what’s going on, the feedback that’s being brought in, and that you’re actually dealing with it, and kind of solving those issues for them.

Caitlin McDonald: That’s such great insights and information there. Ty I see that we are running short on time. Are there any other tips or pieces of advice that you would like to give to our listeners today?

Ty Allen: Yeah, actually there is. So we’ve spent this time, it’s been great talking about the importance of building a practice or a physician’s ratings and reviews, and how that can then help them be found more easily online, and that that data is clear. We have thousands of physicians using our platform who see a significant uptick in their visibility and inbound calls and clicks. But to me, the most exciting thing is once a physician or a practice has built a great reputation online, there’s now a new emerging option that lets you take that reputation and easily leverage it to target more specifically, the patient types that you want in the areas where you want them.

That might be a topic of conversation for another podcast at some point, but what I’m really talking about is the ability that Google has recently made available to take a Google My Business page and convert it into an ad that carries that doctor’s great reputation into a targeted ad campaign that can easily be delivered into certain zip codes, or certain cities to go get the patients that a physician wants as they grow their practice.

Caitlin McDonald: Yes, and that actually would make an excellent future podcast. We truly believe in the Google Ads interface, and their ability to optimize on the different ad sets and utilizing Smart Campaigns to really tie into the the Google My Business listing. So I would love to tap into your insights and your mind on that as well, and to hear how SocialClimb is able to utilize Google Ads campaigns as a way to further reach the right people online. I think that that’s very powerful for medical practices, and again, it shows how you can get all of these different tools working together to reach new patients and get new patients in the door.

Ty Allen: Yeah, awesome, let’s find a time to have that discussion at another time. I really appreciate the opportunity to have been here today, though.

Caitlin McDonald: Wonderful, well, Ty, you have shared such great insight talking about why it’s important to be on different directories and solicit reviews, what tools and technologies are out there, as well as what to do once you do get a positive and a negative review. So we really appreciate your time today. Listeners, if you are interested in learning how SocialClimb can benefit your practice, head on over to their website, SocialClimb.com. Ty, you have social media sites as well so I’m sure they can jump on over to Facebook to learn more about your business and the great work that you’re doing.

Ty Allen: Great, thank you.

Caitlin McDonald: Wonderful thank you so much!

March 25, 2020/by Caitlin McDonald

Identifying Your Target Market and Educating Them

Re-evaluate the platforms you’re using

Survey your audience

Identify a niche you want to target

Tailor your content for your target audience

Set SMART goals

Educate your audience

Tell your brand story

Build your network

Final thoughts

Interview with Dr. Nick Kapustka on how to Build Relationships as a Chiropractor during COVID-19

Pinterest and Tailwind Blog

Pinterest for business

Difference between a personal and business account

Get access to the analytics dashboard

Set up an account with your business name

Getting Started: Pinterest Basics

Create a board

Find and pin content

Track your performance to see what works

Why you should use Tailwind for Pinterest

Pinterest Automation

Post inspector

Smart Schedule

Smart Loop

Schedule Instagram videos

Analytics

Is your social media marketing strategy sorted out?

How to Shift Yoga Practice Amid COVID-19

Introducing Buffalo + Sparrow Yoga Collective with Cole and Rachel.

Why Digital Marketing is Essential for Healthcare

1. In-depth patient analytics

2. Catering to online health care requirements

3. Working on specific health sectors through digital promotion

4. Reach patients on a global scale

5. The best way to gather patient requirements quickly

Conclusion

Get In Touch

Recent Posts