Shannon Kuykendall podcast Interview

Shannon Kuykendall (Kirk-ken-doll) is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner and the Founder of Up Automation, Linkedin Lead Generation Services. She started Up Automation in 2015 after working in the Coaching and Personal Development industry as a Technical Virtual Assistant at Creative VA Services for 12 years.

As an agency owner, Shannon struggled to get new clients in the door. She tried building a lead gen funnel, Facebook Ads, SEO, Content Marketing; you name it. Then someone told her about using LinkedIn for lead generation. They said, “that 80% of all B2B prospects are on LinkedIn”. So she put her focus there, and her results have been tremendous. Once Shannon got the formula down, she decided to stop offering implementation and concentrate on helping other digital marketing agencies fill their calendars with their ideal prospects using LinkedIn.

In this interview, Amber and Shannon spoke about:

  • How businesses can utilize LinkedIn for lead generation
  • Current trends in digital marketing in 2019
  • The Before and After Grid as you create content that brings people in
  • How do identify your potential client’s pain points to be able to gear your messaging around them
  • Why your business needs a strong LinkedIn presence
  • The top 3 things that a business owner should be doing online to see a return from their digital marketing efforts

It was such a pleasure interviewing Shannon on our Podcast. Shannon is very knowledgeable about LinkedIn and how business owners can use it to it’s fullest potential to help grow their businesses

The 3 biggest takeaways for me were:

  1. The before and after grid – how to identify your target markets pain points
  2. LinkedIn is really about building relationships and asking questions. Your target marketing wants to know what’s in it for them when you give them time to talk about themselves and share their story.
  3. The key components you need to have in your profile that will attract your target audience
LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B and it is very important to be consistent with your strategy and one bonus tip Shannon shared was about the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, how to be able to use this LinkedIn tool to get in front of your audience!

Before and After Grid

before_and_after_grid LinkedIn Marketing

Listen to the Podcast Episode on Using LinkedIn to Grow your Business Online

Read the Complete Transcript Below

Hello everyone, this is Amber with the Social Speak Network. I’m so excited for our podcast today. We are talking about how healthcare centers can utilize LinkedIn to grow their business. We have Shannon on with us today.

Amber: Shannon, tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

Shannon: Hi everybody, my name is Shannon and my company’s name is a automation and we specifically do LinkedIn and lead generation for digital marketing agencies.

The main reason we started focusing on that was because I myself had my own agency and we were having problems getting leads. We didn’t have a problem getting people to get calls, we just had problem closing sales, and I needed a consistent way to generate leads and so through some discovery and some conversations we started focusing on digital marketing agencies, and then I turned my business around to completely focus on bringing people in and showing them how to use LinkedIn, as well as, maintaining their own LinkedIn accounts.

80% of the leads out there or highly qualified prospects will be found on LinkedIn. And we’ve been in business for about two years, but I’ve had my own my own business of some sort online since 2005.

A: Wow, that is amazing. So walk us through – before we dive into brand messaging and how businesses can utilize LinkedIn – walk us though the process of how agencies can gain business using LinkedIn.

One of the main things is your profile, your LinkedIn profile is the key. One of the first things you want to do is you want to completely optimize your LinkedIn Profile – from the background header, all the way down through your summary.

Those business profiles or most agency profiles that I see when they’re using their personal profile, all they do is talk about themselves and quite honestly, when your prospects are trying to find you, they don’t really care about you, what they care about is, they’ve got a pain point and they wanna know if you can solve it. Does your agency solve their pain point?

You really structure your profile in a way that addresses pain points and ask questions that hit that button. That’s where you’re going to get your engagement.

When you start connecting with people the first thing they’re going to see is your Profile.

LinkedIn Profile Optimization.

I love how you were talking about these pain points because I think that that’s one of the top things that people miss because they are so worried about talking about themselves, they miss what the WHY for their client.

And so before we jump into the pain point I talk us a little bit about the brand messaging.

How can you incorporate brand messaging into that linked-in profile and are you doing that on both your personal profile and the company page or just one or the other?

We just use the personal profile, quite honestly, the company pages on LinkedIn as far as I’m concerned, they’re useless.

The only thing that we can do with a company page, is you compose articles and you can get people to engage, but we don’t have the ability to send them direct messages. That is why we use the personal profile, because that gives us the ability to directly engage with people who are likely interested in our products or services. The way that we incorporate the brand, we go through a pretty lengthy on-boarding process where we’re asking several questions, we’re really getting into the nitty gritty of what are their products and services who are the people they’ve been working with who are the people they would like to work with and what are some of the struggles that the agency deals with, and then we get into wanting to know more about their prospects, and really where we incorporate the brand is going to be when we ask a pain point or ask a question that addresses a pain point. How we incorporate the brand is when we offer the solution for that pain point.

So do you see any trends with LinkedIn, that businesses should be really paying attention to the side?

We’re going to talk a little bit further about identifying those pain points, but do you see any trends that businesses should really be following with LinkedIn?

The biggest thing with LinkedIn is don’t message somebody and start talking about yourself again. They don’t care.

I see a lot of people on LinkedIn just sending out messages talking about their podcast or talking about a service that they can offer, something that they can help them, and what they’ve completely missed is they didn’t bother to ask a question about a pain point.

All they did was just out the gate running like Me, me, me, we do this, we do this. Nobody cares. You might get a little bit of engagement, but you’re not gonna get a lot and anything you’re gonna turn people off and they’re gonna disconnect from you, so you really, you come at it with a short question.

One of my things is for example, cold calling, do you want to stop cold calling and have a consistent flow of leads coming in the door?

That’s a great question, and yes and it’s an easy question for them to reply back. Yeah, I do, or it now not interested in it, or I… And that’s a much better way to get people to engage. Then just coming right out the gate, talking about yourself.

You’re changing that whole mindset of that conversation to about your potential client. And they’re like, “Oh they really do care about me or they really do want to know what I love.” So, just asking that question and really wanting to engage with them. People like to talk about themselves. So when you ask someone a question that allows them to talk about themselves, that’s where you get the engagement.

Okay, so I am so excited when we had our call for obviously before the podcast, you had mentioned the before and after grid, so can you explain to that to a little bit more?

Absolutely, so the before and after grid. This is how you really figure out what the pain points are of your prospect.

It’s a really short little exercise, and in the podcast description there is a link to the article by Digital Marketer. And it was going through this exercise that really helped me develop the pain points that my prospects are dealing with.

What you do is you create a grid at the top, you’re going to write Before and on the next side, you’re going to write After. Then you’re going to put four lines: Feel, average, day, and status. These are the four questions you’re going to ask when you’re trying to figure out what are the pain points of your prospects? The first thing you’re going to ask is what?

So what did your prospect have before they start working with you – are they frustrated, are they annoyed. Do they have a lack of prospects?

Alright, so you’ll write that in that box, then you’re going to ask: ‘How does my prospect feel before they start working for me?’ Will likely they’re frustrated, they’re a little concerned, they’ve got cash flow issues all these different feelings. And then next you ask, so what is your prospects average day look like before they start working for you or working with you?

Well, the average day… They probably spend a lot of time cold-calling, and nobody’s picking up the phone. And again, there’s some frustration, because they’re cold calling where they’re knocking on doors or they’re going into businesses and it takes a lot of time. And then a question is what is the status of your prospects before they work with you, and the status again kind of a repeat of the first three questions to the grid.

They’re frustrated because they’re consistently trying to reach out to people and nobody’s picking up the phone or their sales cycles too, long, it’s just they’re frustrated. That’s how everybody feels before. Well then, you wanna ask, “Well what are your prospects feeling after they start working with you?”

So alright, what do they at an… They have a consistent… Now they’ve got leads coming in, they’ve got people who are interested in their products and services, and that’s a start that I… And then how do they feel after they start working with you? They feel great, that the pressure has been released. They’ve got a consistent. They’re consistently talking to people that are interested in what they have to offer. What is their average day like after they start working with you?

They’re busy, they’re doing what it is that they love to do, they get to offer their products and services to the people that are actively interested. And again, what’s their status? After they start working with you, they’re happy. They have a little more free time because this piece has been taken over and and now they can again do what it is that they love to do they can work, they can work on their business instead of in their business, and that I as a call the before and after Grid and it’s going through that little exercise that you start to develop. Okay, these are some questions I should be asking my prospects if there is. We’re cold-calling, but I would like an easier way to get leads then that’s how I’m gonna address that question.

Now that you’ve identified these pain points as far as what they’re struggling with, and what that life looks like, before working with you or individual and then that after… How do you tie those pain points into that brand message? Are you going off of the, before content or the after or how do you marry the two?

So at the beginning of when we do our write-ups for the summary and we start to develop their prospect profile in their messaging, we go out the before, because that’s where you’re going to be able to push the buttons, that’s where you’re going to get them to react and so once they react, and then they engage in the messaging that’s when we’re able to offer up the After. The after is the solution.

Alright, and again, the solution isn’t going to go in and you’re not gonna come in and be real craggy about what your company does. Again, you’re gonna talk about… So this is the solution to what also the… And if you want to talk to me and learn more about what we do, then let’s schedule a call.

I love that. I think that the whole online sales process is very overwhelming, for, a lot of it as one. But when you break it down and you really get in that space of your target market and who they are, what do they feel like, was their pain points? That sales process becomes a lot easier because then it turns into that conversation, you’re struggling with this, this, and this. How do you wanna turn it around?

So it’s a very simple process once you overcome those pain points, and really identifying what those are.

One making this sales can be intimidating anyway. So when you think of sales is we’re gonna have a conversation I’m gonna learn about you, you’re gonna learn about me. It makes the process that much easier and when it comes to whether or not someone wants to work with you, the biggest thing is they need to know you, they need to like you, and they need to trust you. And the way that happens is to that first conversation and maybe there needs to be other conversations after that but those are some three key ingredients that need to happen in before somebody decides to close with you.

I love it. And so, a B2B businesses, and really Otto crucial is it for them to have a strong line in presence and should they’re posting their content strategy also be around these, these pain points to relate with their target audience.

I highly recommend, especially when we’re working with clients twice a week. Post some content in your News Feed, so we’re consistently building up LinkedIn connections.

You want to stay in front of your LinkedIn connections. And we also make sure that when we’re creating and putting together the profile that we’ve got their brand, their logo, something that really makes them stand out is present. So you wanna stay in front of them it takes the average of seven times for somebody to see you before they actually will engage a and so get your brand out there, post a couple of things, a week and stay relevant and stay on top of it and stay in front of the people that you’re connecting with. It’s very, very important. If you don’t do it, maybe your process will be a little bit slower, but things tend to pick up when you’re consistently on LinkedIn and your active and you’re actively engaging with the people who are engaging with you, right? And what do you think that that sales cycle… We would get asked? How long is it gonna take before we see results within and really building those connections again you’re nurturing those relationships. How long should somebody give linked in to be able to see results for their business?

So six months a 100% of six months to a… We did 4-608 leads for a company called the draw shop in 1660s and that’s almost six months.

He was very actively involved in the process with us. And that’s one of the things we tell our clients as well. You can’t just come to us and then I set it and forget it. We constantly are working with you to optimize your message so that you get the highest engagement possible. I’ve seen people get engagement within the first 24 hours of us starting a campaign and I see people not get anything at all because there are some industries that LinkedIn just isn’t gonna work for, but sometimes we don’t it until we have a conversation.

And I’ve turned business away because of an industry that I’ve already worked with someone else comes to me in that same industry. I’ve turned it away, knowing that I can’t get them the results that I can get other business I think that that’s another key point is really knowing what social media platform is the best for your business because I know with us, we work a lot with the medical industries and so, LinkedIn is a big place where the doctors and office at last were there, they’re not on Facebook. So, it’s important as a business owner to know what platform is gonna work. So as… And you’re right, sometimes that’s only to figure it out is trial and error, so it… But you also… Those pain points can also help identify if your target audience is on LinkedIn, as well, right?

Okay, so what are the top three things that a business owner should be doing online to see a return from their marketing efforts?

So there’s actually a quote by a gentleman named harm and he says If you are consistent, you will get there if you were persistent, you will get there and if you are consistent, you will keep it. And I can’t stress that enough, I find that most people don’t give anything enough time to see results. Everybody wants a quick fix, and there’s just no such thing is that you have to be patient and you have to be consistent with what you’re doing at a…

I’ve been doing LinkedIn for a little over two years now and I have some weeks that are slow, and then I have some weeks that are really fast or they are really, really busy, so… So consistency been… If you’re coming into it with this is gonna be a quick fix, then first of all, you’re probably not gonna be an ideal prospect for me, ’cause you’ve got to think in terms of the long game.

Alright, most things that are quick fixes or if anybody calls it a quick fix, it’s a fly-by-night it’s only gonna last for a couple of months and then it’s gone because everybody felt on it and then it sort of runs it for everybody. So linked in is one of those things you’ve got to be thoughtful you’ve got to be mesoa.

And do you have any tools again? And I cannot agree with you more about the consistency. I feel like I’m always saying that to our clients. And you have to be consistent, you have to have a plan strategy for every aspect of your digital marketing and with Linkin and I would assume you need to know what articles that you wanna be posting as an ice. What type of post you wanna be putting up what type of videos, you wanna be doing and then that’s just the posting piece, then what that messaging piece. Who are you connecting with? So are there any tools or things that you use to help organize that LinkedIn strategy? So one of the things that we use is it’s called LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and that’s LinkedIn, social selling tool. It’s a vital piece when it comes to identifying and getting in front of your ideal prospects especially when you start connecting with people and bringing in leads.

And the reason we use sales navigators because they have a search function that is highly robust and it allows us to save the searches so that we can consistently get in front of new people, over a period of time as a… That’s one thing I… Now, there are some third party tools that help speed up the process. Like Lead Connect to or LinkedIn helper. And I think there’s a few others out there.

You need to be careful though. I don’t really endorse using those tools simply because LinkedIn doesn’t want you to use them and… And it’s too easy for people to abuse the process because they’re trying to speed things up, so definitely should be working with somebody who knows what they’re doing on LinkedIn and and making sure that they’re sending the right message on your behalf.

So in so having that strategy, and that’s with those tools, whatever with LinkedIn platform, there’s these great tools that are out there and then as soon as somebody abuses them, I pay all the fun out of it for all of us. But really… So you use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and then do you recommend putting a strategy together for your post the topics and curated content? And stuff as well, so we don’t typically do the posting, but we do encourage our clients to do it so, and if they have post and they don’t have time to post them, they can always send them to us and we’ll post on their behalf.

But ideally, what I typically tell them again to post a week, ideally, they can go back to previous blog posts and post those. And you can also through your content, only a certain percentage of people are gonna see your content at any given time. So you have 10 articles on your blog you’ve got five weeks of content, go back through and rotate it. There’s nothing wrong with that at… So you don’t always have to have new content, it’s just about staying relevant and staying in front of your prospect.

Okay, and how can people connect with you online, if they’re interested in your services or wanna learn more about what you do? Where can they find you?

So people can find me at automation dot com and right there, they’ll be able to book a call, they’ll be able to learn more about the services. Learn more about me and what I do or they can send me an email at Shannon@automation dot com.

Wonderful, well I really appreciate your time today than… And I’m so excited about LinkedIn. And it’s definitely kind of that hidden gem that people kind of underestimate with getting leads and really building their business, but it’s a platform that can really elevate their business to the next level.

A 100%. I swear by it. We’ve done very, very well.

The clients that we’ve worked with, that really engaged with the process and understand how we work and also done incredibly well wonderful. Well, we will make sure that we have the link to the before and after grid and the LinkedIn Sales Navigator in the description below, and if you, if have any questions or comments, we would love to hear from you, and again, please connect with Shannon on LinkedIn if you have any questions, check out on her website, thank you everyone.

Interview with Shannon Kuykendall (Up Automation - LinkedIn Specialist)
Healthcare Digital Marketing insights with Gold Medical Marketing Founder Daniel Goldberg

In this week’s podcast, I had the honor of interviewing Daniel Goldberg, Founder and CEO of Gold Medical Marketing.

Daniel Goldberg is widely regarded as a pioneer in Medical Marketing and Public Relations and was an integral part of the transition to Direct to Patient Marketing. Daniel’s unique knowledge of the business of healthcare and patient behaviors allow him to create marketing and public relations campaigns that reach specifically targeted audiences that maximize ROI. His ability to identify markets for potential patients allows GMM’s clients to penetrate new audiences and increase patient volume exponentially. Daniel has also lectured both nationally and internationally on the topic of Medical Marketing at some of the most esteemed medical conferences.

Daniel founded Gold Medical Marketing in 2012 after serving as the Director of Marketing and Business Development in a private orthopedic / spine practice and ASC. In the process, GMM has grown to be one of the most successful medical marketing firms and represents medical practices across the country.

In this interview with CEO and founder, Daniel Goldberg, we focused on web design, brand awareness initiatives, and transactional marketing efforts for the Orthopedic, Spine or Neurosurgery Practice. We covered:

  • How Inbound Marketing, Web design, and traditional marketing work for orthopedic brands.
  • Current trends or wellness practices with digital marketing in 2019.
  • Why you should create a Quarterly marketing budget for your health center rather than an annual budget.
  • The top 3 things that a wellness center should be doing online to see a return from their SEM efforts.
  • The top strategy that should be followed, but often marketing teams get wrong.

Learn more about how to use Digital Marketing for your Healthcare center.

I had a couple of great takeaways from this health care marketing interview and I’m sure that you will as well for your own medical practice.

Setting Goals for your Orthopedic, Spine or Neurosurgery Practice Marketing Campaigns

First and foremost, it is ever important to make sure your team understands the goals of the marketing programs that you are running.

Are your campaigns geared towards one time transactions and getting somebody in the door the first time they search for a specialty?

Are they built around branding and brand recognition?

Once this is clearly defined, you can have a greater understanding of how each campaign actually affects your customer acquisition cost and patient growth.

Understand How Your Patient Journey is Reflected in On and Off-line Marketing Campaigns

The next takeaway is to take the steps towards better understanding your patient journey.

It’s not just what happens online, but also their experience within your office. For example, if a prospect sees language online that grows enough confidence in your expertise to give your practice a call, is the front desk knowledgeable about the services that you offer?

Can they answer simple questions about the process, the physician, and generally show they place the patient first?

Are you making a good first impression with your website, with your social media, with that first phone call?

Set your Healthcare Marketing Budget Quarterly Rather than Annually

And then lastly, and I think that this is the most important, is thinking about your marketing budget, not as an annual budget, but rather on a quarterly basis.

If a campaign is working well for bringing clients in the door and yields a positive ROI from digital marketing for your practice, you do your practice a disservice if the budget for that campaign can’t be scaled over time. Conversely, if you are testing a new marketing campaign with A/B testing and optimization, you can’t decide after a week that the campaign is a failure. Work the systems, work the processes, and, if after 90 days you still aren’t seeing a return, find another avenue to reallocate and test your health center marketing budget.

Rather than thinking about your marketing budget as an annual budget, we recommend putting it into three-month increments and doing a quarterly assessment of how your campaigns have either allowed you to reach your marketing goals or where they leave room for improvement.

Please be sure to subscribe to the Social Speak Podcast for more interviews with experts in digital marketing for health and wellness businesses.

To learn more about Gold Medical Marketing visit: GoldMedicalMarketing.com

Listen to the Healthcare Marketing Podcast Interview

Watch the Digital Marketing for Orthopaedic Centers Interview

 

Complete Transcript for Interview

The Hello, I’m Caitlin McDonald, and welcome to the newest episode of The Social Speak Network podcast.

Today, we are joined by Daniel Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Gold Medical Marketing.

Daniel Goldberg is widely regarded as a pioneer in medical marketing and public relations and was an integral part of the transition to direct-to-patient marketing. Daniel’s unique knowledge of the business, of healthcare, and of patient behaviors allow of him to create marketing and public relations campaigns that reach specifically targeted audiences that maximize ROI.

His ability to identify markets for potential patients allows Gold Medical Marketing’s clients to penetrate new audiences and increase patient volume exponentially.

Daniel has also lectured both nationally and internationally on the topic of Medical Marketing at some of the most esteemed medical conferences. Daniel founded gold Medical Marketing in 2012 after serving as the Director of Marketing and Business Development in a private orthopedic practice. In the process, Gold Medical Marketing has grown to be one of the most successful medical marketing firms and represents medical practices across the country.

So please join me in welcoming Daniel, to our podcast.

Caitlin: Daniel, we are so excited to have you on the show today.

Daniel: Thank you so much for having me, it’s a true pleasure.

C: First to kick things off, tell us a little bit about your background in digital marketing for orthopedic centers.

D: I’ve run a gold medical marketing for about eight or nine years. My background in digital marketing started when I was working within a private spine practice, it was about 10 years ago. I was really at the pivotal point where Google Adwords and even social media started to become patient acquisition tools and there was a shift from traditional marketing. I learned, I guess, on the fly about SEM and about social media marketing and the power of those tools for patient acquisition. So shortly after I worked in that practice, I started this firm. We’ve grown ever since, and it’s been a fun journey.

C: Awesome, awesome. Isn’t that interesting how most people who run agencies got their start in digital marketing and social media just on the fly, you had to learn it while you were in it.

D: It’s funny to talk to some of our employees or some of the people who either majored in in college or are new to it, and they’ve done things like Google tutorials and stuff to learn it and they have a good grasp on, but they don’t.

It’s interesting to discuss with them some of the changes that have happened over the past five or ten years where what they’re looking at it historically how it worked, and it was a lot more difficult to track things like successes in patient acquisition. Now the data and the data tools are so much more advanced than they were even five or eight years ago.

C: I mean, even three years ago.

D: Yeah, absolutely, the more data that those tools include, the easier it is to work with clients and report meaningful data.

C: Great, well let’s talk a little bit about your practice and your view of digital marketing. So your business, Gold Medical Marketing really takes a holistic approach to marketing. You not only help manage social media or advertising campaigns, but you also encourage a review of website design for healthcare, and analysis of what happens off-line, which a lot of agencies don’t really pay attention to.

Can you describe how your process to digital marketing for healthcare centers differs from traditional digital marketing?

D: As you know, the patient experience, or the patient journey, is different. You have to understand this when you build your website to creating digital marketing campaigns. You have to understand how the patient thinks, how the decision-making process works, and then how to cater to that patient story.

How does your Orthopaedic Website Increase your bottom line?

Something with web design, a lot of times practices will have a website that they like or that they think is the best for them, but whether is it the mobile experience, or the content doesn’t suit the patient, is not what the patient’s looking for, aesthetically and outwardly for you as a practitioner.

Your site can look nice, it could be what you wanted, but the navigation is difficult to understand, the calls to action aren’t there, and those are the things that increase conversion.

So we have to look at things from a branding perspective of the practice, but also integrate the best practices for patient traffic and everything for us starts usually with the website. Whether it’s social media traffic, Google traffic, or even offline things like print and magazine ads, those calls to action on the ads are always going direct back to the website.

The front door of your practice is now your website.

We want to make sure that if we’re spending money, either in traditional marketing, or digital marketing, that we are bringing the potential patients to a place that has a high likelihood of actually acquiring that patient. That’s why we always look at the website first and say, “Okay from mobile perspective, is your website mobile responsive?”

Google started penalizing sites that were not mobile responsive, about five years ago, and still to this day, I’m shocked at the amount of practice sites that we look at that aren’t mobile responsive.

That has a huge influence on your organic SEO or cost per click for Google ads, just the overall patient experience. We need to look at those things plus the content and calls to action, first before we start any sort of marketing program.

Marketing with a Patient Journey in Mind is More than Content Marketing Online

C: And then can you talk about how the patient journey transcends offline again, back to when the person at the front desk is answering that call and scheduling that initial appointment?

D: So, we can you talk about how you bring language kind of all through that process. We’ve worked a lot with orthopedic centers to neurosurgeon practices. In those instances, patients have an inherent fear of seeing the surgeon because they’re going be told, they think they’re going to be told they need head surgery, so a lot of them try to delay seeing a surgeon as long as possible. They try other means, and finally get to a point where they know that they need to see a specialist.

When they’re calling and they’re doing the research, whether they’re getting a recommendation from a friend or family member, they’re recalling an ad, whether is a print or online, they’re going to do their research. They’re going to look at the physician and practice themselves, they are going to view the website.

You need to help these prospects understand that the practice understands their concerns, understands their some of the fears or potential misconceptions. It’s important once that patient is even comfortable enough to then call then the front desk, the reception staff, that’s the front line. The call is the first interaction that the patient has with your practice. So the willingness of the reception staff to be accommodating – to understand, to listen and to not rush the patient – is very important.

There is also the importance for the reception staff to be able to answer some preliminary questions. So, I call your practice and I say, “how does your doctor do this type of procedure” if the reception staff says, “Hold on, let me check. I’m not sure” that sort of lack of confidence translates to the entire patient journey. Now the patient starts to lose confidence in that practice.

A lot of patients are looking at in multiple different practices in the area. They’re calling and polling different practices. And in most cases are going to go see the doctor whose staff made that patient feel the most comfortable and feel like they’ve come to the right place.

That’s a very important part of marketing that I think is overlooked.

You can bring traffic to a site and increase calls to the staff, but if the staff can’t capture them or aren’t confident in making that patient aware that this is where they should be, then you’re spending money, but not getting anything out of it.

C: I think it’s so important that we don’t ever view, and I think we’ll talk about this a little bit later, but that we won’t ever view digital marketing just in its own little bubble. It really is integrating your practice from that first click to the website through to scheduling an appointment.

Digital Marketing Trends in 2019 for Orthopedic, Spine or Neurosurgery Practice

So Daniel, what current trends are you seeing for health centers and medical practices with digital marketing in 2019?

D: So those practices now have acknowledged the relevance and the importance of social media. A lot of them were late, they were concerned about some of the information they were conveying from a clinical ethical standpoint, what they can say, what they couldn’t say, how to deal with things. I’m sure you’ve experienced negative patient feedback, how to deal with those things.

We really try to position social media as a valuable tool in patient acquisition through Facebook and Instagram advertising platforms, then the organic side. Having an active and engaging presence where you’re not just posting content from The New York Times, The New Yorker, or from a Medical Journal each week. Your healthcare practice should be posting true work, and content that speaks to the patient about your experience, your opinions on certain things – that’s very important.

On the organic side, on the paid side it’s using the behaviors using the data that Facebook aggregates about people in the area to target, people who don’t already know about you.

That’s one thing we’ve seen a lot of practices come around to.

The second is with hospitals of absorbing more smaller private practices, and thus increasing the competition for market share, a lot of smaller private practice are saying, “We need to have a marketing budget and a marketing plan, a holistic plan to compete and to stay competitive and independent from the larger health and hospital systems.”

A lot of the small practices will never out spend a multi-million hospital marketing budget, but we have to tell them how they can be more agile, and how they can spend better than some of their competitors, but not necessarily more.

And the last trend I see is a lot of practices were exploring things like TV and print again.

They’re looking at publications that are specifically suited to certain demographics. If you’re talking about what Jonathan a reader of Style magazine who watches TV certain times of day-to-report TV, those initiatives are more brand awareness focused.

I think what healthcare centers are seeing the difference between transactional marketing initiatives like search engine marketing, and more brand awareness initiatives like TV and radio, and even things like YouTube pre-roll ads, social media, and more brand awareness concepts.

C: Gotcha, so these practices are paying attention to what they want those KPIS and the goals of each of these verticals to be, and then finding the way to reach the audience to reach those goals.

D: I think as a sure you will know it’s important for them to understand the anticipated results, the anticipated KPIS from each vertical not every pollution is the same. So something like Google Search Ads is more transactional. You are going see an ROI quicker and the sole intention is to garden new patient.

Other things like traditional media, social media, display advertising, YouTube pre-roll advertising, those are more brand awareness.

Brand awareness may take the longer time to convert a patient.

It’s important for us as marketers to clarify those distinctions, so that our clients have the right expectation. We don’t want them to think that social media and Google Ads, produce the same results in the same period of time. That’s important to them to understand. So when I think that’s something that either their understanding better themselves or us as agencies are better explaining to them.

C: That is so important, to make sure that we’re having that clear communication and that conversation about what to expect with each of the different strategies.

D: I think that you and I both know that we see people in the digital marketing space who sort of over-promise. They tell clients what they should do and how beneficial this will be for them. And that they’ll see an instantaneous return. And that’s sort of for us, true health care marketers, sort of sets us up that if a client has been with a less than truthful company in the past, they have an inherent bad taste in their mouth for marketing because it failed the first time. The reason it failed the first time, was because the expectations and the goals weren’t clear.

So, as true health care marketing agencies, it’s our job to better distinguish what the goals are and what the intentions of each platform are.

Top Three Marketing Tactics a Medical Practice Should Be Doing Online

C: What are the top three things that medical practice should be doing online to see a return from their digital marketing efforts?

D: That comes down to understanding the patient journey.

Whether it be at the start with engine marketing, you’re looking at patients your area who are looking for you right now. So, they’re searching orthopedic surgeon near me or plastic surgeon. What they’re telling you is they want to find a provider right at this moment, it’s an easy sort of one-to-one transaction.

Understanding your cost per acquisition and understanding how much you cost to acquire a new patient and then what the revenue derived from that patient is over 3, 6, 9, 12 month period is really going help you determine your ROI.

The other thing is brand awareness so not every patient makes decisions instantaneously.

Some people have a medical problem, but they choose to either self-manage them or they choose to better, I guess, better to ignore them. And have using data, and using behaviors, you can target those patients with things like display as peril ads, and social media.

We know that we might be need of our services. And you’re constantly showing them the plan.

When they find the point of decision making, the brand recall sets in… So now they’re not searching cosmetic surgeon any more. They’re searching for your name. When they search for your name, your cost per acquisition will always be cheaper.

Because it’s your name, that’s an important thing that they have that a practice needs to understand. Not every patient makes a decision that morning, sometimes takes three or six months to make that decision.

Then the most important part is ROI tracking for your healthcare practice, so clicks and impressions and shares, are very important.

But for most physicians, they’ll always say I’m black and white and I want to know what I spent, what I paid, and what I got after the call.

Having call tracking or form tracking in place on the website where it’s new patient tracking or new form tracking, it’s very important to say not all of your clicks translated to a patience of your website. Got 10,000 clicks month, don’t think that was 10,000 patients, right?

That’s not a fair measurement. Having things in place to track new patient calls, have a compliant or new patient forms, is really going to say, okay, for the money you spend, this is what your return was. Here are your new patient acquisitions, here was the cost, and then let’s talk about the bill charges and the receivables over a course of months. But a lot of marketing is destined to fail or not to perform as well as it could if there’s no ROI tracking.

You’re spending money now, but you don’t know what you’re getting for it, so, I’m sure you… Well now after three to six months, people, your clients are going to want to answer truly what the black and white data is, and if we can’t provide it to them a lot of times they see it as waste or intangible, so that’s important that we have those metrics in place so that they understand. Here’s actually what you’ve got for the money you spent.

C: Yes, I absolutely, absolutely it’s so important to always be paying attention to that data and really seeing what it means, compared to those pre-establish goals that you’ve already said for that marketing channel.

I love how you keep on going back to, in the short-term successes and then also the long-term branding that will lead to successes, but it just sees time.

So, this continuing to bring it back to that not all marketing is created with the same goal in mind.

D: Yeah, absolutely, there’s room for brand awareness, there’s one for transaction, it’s about to get the expectation of what each initiative is and what that initiative is going to produce. So that’s very important for us to be able to communicate it up.

The top digital marketing strategy that should be followed but often, marketing teams get wrong

C: Yes, definitely. So what’s the top strategy that should be followed but often, marketing teams get wrong?

D: So I think it with marketing teams, and one physician to discuss marketing what their internal team or external teams, it’s becoming locked into a budget per year. So practice was that okay, we’re only going to spend this budget per year.

It helps from a fiscal perspective and it helps from the financial planning perspective, but it doesn’t help when you have a campaign or something you were doing that’s working very well, but you can’t forgo that or you can’t add to that because you’re locked into this amount. You were spending $500 a month in Google ads and it was performing incredibly well and it was working very well and you were getting a free ROI on that.

So if you have a yearly budget, you can’t add to that because you are already allocated your money for 12 months. So your social campaigns are incredibly engaging and they’re incredibly effective and generating traffic, which is translating to new patients. You can’t then spend more money and that’s get more engagement and more brand awareness because you locked yourself into only spending a certain amount of money over the course of 12 months. So I think what practices need to look at is quarterly, the data that they’re getting from their internal external teams, what it means, what their ROI is, and then projecting another three-month.

For a lot of things as well, at it takes time to accumulate. So especially with brand awareness and social we want look at that data and that engagement over more than just 30 days, or 30 days, 45 days, 60 days, and then make strategic decisions based on the data we you’ve gathered, right?

So, it we will run an ad two weeks through on a Facebook ad and made a decision off the data. We have a limited range and limited impressions, and thus limited data. It’s helpful if we can say, “Okay, for 90 days, we’re going to run these two ads against each other, we’re going to test these different creatives or we’re going to test these different ad copies and then at the end of 90 days, we’re going to explore what the data said and then make decisions based on that.”

But it’s hard when we know the next day that we have the exact same amount of money.

If we knew that something was producing and we knew that something was effective, and it was producing an ROI. Why not poor gas into that fire? I think a lot of partition restructure is how they look at their marketing budgets. January first, your budget shouldn’t be allocated through December 31st, it should be a quarterly strategy.

C: Yeah, and you know you hear about this much more with e-commerce sites that are selling products. It’s easy, very easy to measure with that first purchase, dollar in dollar out if you’re getting that dollar and dollar-out with follow-up, purchases afterwards, adding to the customer lifetime value. It’s easy to scale, but with medical practices often having that set budget. And it’s holding you back in the long run. And because if you’re getting client in and it’s a it’s converting well and that ratio between customer acquisition costs, and lifetime value is working in your favor, keep pushing that, absolutely.

D: And a lot of times, especially in healthcare, a patient acquisition has different values of or a simple example, if a patient comes in with a season position one time for an acute injury or A to condition the provider may be 200 or 100-500. So if their class probation, a patient was 40, and their return was 150, it’s about three to one for the… That needs to undergo a complex surgery that the bills are not tens of thousands of dollars.

Well, that’s a whole different metric now.

We have to look at one e-commerce where everything has a flat rate, a flat sort of cost, produce, and then your income, all of that medical practices don’t have.

It’s so much in what the revenue generated, it’s been from the procedure itself, the insurance company to everything. There are so many variables that you can’t just sort of say, “Okay here’s your flat ROI for every new acquisition. Some acquisitions have a three-to-one is some 300-1 ROI. That’s why quarterly we need to look at things like revenue and bills charged to us to say, “And here’s what it’s actually produced in which is important.”

C: Actually, in a previous podcast episode, we were talking about how when you’re creating these marketing campaigns and thinking about the customer journey, or that prospect journey think about those follow-on services. If you’re fixing the knee, then it might be the hip, then it might be the other hip.

So, it’s one attention to all those other services and surgeries and things that your practice will be beneficial for in the future.

D: Absolutely, and then also translates to outside of just the pet practice, but any type of practice, there’s also the intangible of if you provide a good service to a patient, the referrals that will come from that patient that’s almost impossible to measure because that patient might help five with our friends to go see you and you may not be able to track that or you might not know it’s how that patient found you, but that’s ROI, as well that you can track what is important to understand. So there’s tangible ROI and there’s the intangibles as well.

There’s also the idea that if you’re a primary care provider, or you’re a dentist or you’re even someone who sees acute conditions. I have a seven-year-old son so they take my son’s the same primary care position as I see because I like him. That’s value as well to the loyalty to that practice, that’s a lifetime value. They have to look at that as well.

C: Yeah, yeah, that is so important to the tangible and the intangible and really how the network of revenue that your practice could be bringing in could stem from one person in particular and just grow out from there.

D: It’s why I think years ago, a lot of physicians went door to door to all the referring physicians, offices to solicit or for all to get there, their follow-ups are there, the things they couldn’t treat, that was the intention.

Now that’s often done a patient side where if the patient is happy you’re providing conservation good offers the patient, they’re the ones we’re going to spread the word. They are the ones who are going to refer people to you. So again, it’s an intangible that sort intangible is difficult for us to digest because we want to see the data and we want to know at everything that’s happening, but in the community, it’s very important.

Gold Medical Marketing – a top ranked agency for healthcare and medical practices

C: Great, great. So, Daniel, your business is Gold Medical Marketing and you are a top ranked agency for healthcare and medical practices and tell us a little bit about your company, and your services.

D: So we do everything from traditional digital marketing whether that be web, design Google pay-per-click, SEO content creation, social media management marketing video production a graphic design, really, the whole gamut of services for a practice. We pride ourselves and being so one stop shop for orthopedic spine neurosurgery practices, we understand that for Brand messaging and brand consistency having everything in-house is important.

I think one of our bigger distinctions is the understanding of ROI and how to quietly track ROI, and tie that down, to revenue to show a practice true growth from a financial perspective, not just from a digital perspective.

You want to take the digital data and translate that into financial data for them, so they can really understand their marketing program, and what’s being done for them. So I think we are the only from the country we specialize is solely in those three fields.

We’ve spent about 10 years figuring out not just the clinical side, but also the patient’s perspective. We like to tell a lot of our marketing around the thousands of interviews we’ve done with patients to understand how they think and then translate that to a practice, so that practice can be positioned to understand the patient and thus acquire more patients.

C: Yes, I great, awesome. And then lastly, are there any digital marketing strategies that your team is currently testing that you don’t think many other agencies are implementing for their clients?

D: I think one of the things we’ve come around to a lot more recently is display advertising. Google Adwords has gotten a lot better at where it puts this by advertising how the display network works, and we’re starting to understand better that as we mentioned earlier that not every transaction is instantaneous especially with orthopedics.

People delay seeing a specialist or delay a procedure for extended periods of time, but because of the data aggregation on Google and with Facebook as well, those brand awareness initiatives are really important.

So when that patient does make the decision were top-of-mind and then the cost per was its cheaper. I think a lot of agencies focus a lot on just search, just so just Google searches or Facebook searches. We realize that not every patient wakes out one day and says, “Okay I’m going to have surgery.” There’s a journey there.

So, it’s understanding that journey, and then using brand awareness to capture that patient is something that we’ve really… I think, one, we perfected over the last year.

C: So, rather than only targeting people at that end of the funnel, when they’re ready to make that decision, it’s about capturing them at the top of the funnel, and being there every step of the way, so that when they’re ready to finally give you a call on your practice a call, you’re already top of mind, they already know your phone number by heart.

D: That’s what we’ve seen the social for a lot of what we see the social it is very transactional we are seeing patient acquisitions, come immediately from social ads on the other side were also seen as a brand awareness tool so data we’re getting from social say, here’s the ads or the audiences that are immediately transactional and here’s the ones where they’re focused on brand awareness. It’s important differentiate those too because we do see a lot of ROI received ROI on social media marketing. It’s just depending upon what the target is, what the service line is what the focus is, that’s what we’re saying that I think for you explain it, I’m sure as you explain to your clients that not everything is instantaneous.

Yes, here’s what we’re focusing on for and warms perspective clients, here’s what we’re focusing on from a transactional perspective.

C: You have, absolutely, absolutely Daniel. Is there anything else that I forgot to ask?

D: Not that I can think of.

C: Great, great, well, thank you so much for joining us today on the social speak podcast. I loved hearing your perspective and I know it for a fact, that you guys over at gold Medical Marketing are doing a fantastic job of your clients. So thank you for being on the show today.

D: Thank you. It was a privilege to be on the show and I can’t thank you enough.

C: Wow, that was such a pleasure having Daniel on our show today.

Now, I had a couple of great takeaways from this and I’m sure that you did as well for your own medical practice. The first thing is to make sure that you understand the goals of the marketing programs that you’re running. Are your campaigns geared towards one time transactions or getting somebody in the door, right when they’re ready to come on in or are they built around branding and brand recognition, and then also understanding how these campaigns actually affect your customer acquisition cost.

The next takeaway I had is understanding your patient journey. So it’s not just what happens online in the language that they see online, but also how that translates to their experience within your office. And when they’re talking with somebody to schedule an appointment, are they knowledgeable about the services that you offer? Are you making a good first impression with your website, with your social media, with that phone call?

And then lastly… And I think that this is the most important, is thinking about your marketing budget, not on an annual basis, but rather on a quarterly basis if a campaign is working well in bringing clients in the door and that customer acquisition cost to lifetime value, or even first time value, is it leading to a positive return for your practice, you want to continue to scale that, over time. So rather than, again, thinking about your marketing budget as an annual budget, we recommend putting it into three-month increments, and doing a quarterly assessment of how your campaigns have either led your goals. Or they need where they leave room for improvement.

So thank you again, Daniel for joining our show today, and if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the Social Speak Network, we are on iTunes and PodBean, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

Healthcare Digital Marketing insights with Gold Medical Marketing Founder Daniel Goldberg
Deb Krier Interview about LinkedIn for Healthcare Marketing

For more than 10 years, Deb has worked with professionals to optimize their use of LinkedIn. As the founder of Wise Women Communications, a full-service marketing agency, she sees LinkedIn as a vital marketing tool for professionals at any level.

Throughout her career, Deb has worked with corporations and nonprofit organizations developing and maximizing their marketing and public relations efforts. However, senior executives often don’t see themselves as something that needs to be marketed.

Deb developed “LinkedIn for C-Suite” to provide the assistance busy executives require. By spending a minimal amount of time, professionals work with our strategists to create and optimize their LinkedIn Profiles.

With more than 20 years of experience, Deb also has a Master’s Degree in Marketing as well as a Master’s Degree in Communication Management. She has the experience and knowledge to help busy executives make an impact with their LinkedIn Profiles. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

In this interview we discuss:

  • Current trends for businesses using LinkedIn for marketing in 2019.
  • Tactics that were expected to perform well or had a lot of hype, but failed to take hold in 2018.
  • The top 3 things that a business owner or marketing team should be doing on LinkedIn to see a return from their efforts.
  • The top strategy that should be followed, but often marketing teams get it wrong.

To learn more about Social Speak, please follow our podcast on iTunes https://apple.co/2GPs1bt

Listen to Amber and Deb’s LinkedIn Tips and Tricks Interview:

Or watch the LinkedIn Interview:

 

Read the transcript:

Podcast with Deb Krier, LinkedIn Marketing Expert

 

Hello, everyone. I am Amber with the Social Speak Network. I’m really excited for today’s podcast, we have Deb Krier on with us.

LinkedIn in is something that clients ask us a lot about, and I feel like it’s one of those platforms that’s been around for a long time, but they’ve been in my opinion, in and out of the social media trends and I feel like in 2019 is something, it’s a kind of an untapped gold mine in a way, if you know how to use it. So Deb  is an expert in LinkedIn, and we have some great topics we are going to talk to you today about.

Amber: Deb, tell us little bit about who you are and your background in digital marketing.

 

Deb: Amber, thank you so much for having me on your program. This is going to be so much fun. We actually know each other from Colorado and now we’re Southern girl so that’s very fun.

 

But I’ve been on LinkedIn, since I believe 2006. so it was one of the first platforms and I… Actually, it was the first digital platform that I got on some of the others didn’t even exist yet, but I got on LinkedIn because I was, I’m looking for a job. So you need to be on LinkedIn type of thing and then other things have come along. I don’t do tons because we can get overwhelmed, right?

 

You and I have business owners that come up to me and they say, “Oh well, I should be here and here and here and here and here and here and then their head goes.

 

I was like, No, no, no, pick one or two and go from there. I mean I’m still not on Instagram, I do really, but it’s just… I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and that’s it. Those are the only digital platforms that I use. Because you can get overwhelmed or if you’re like me, it’s not overwhelming, it’s very distracting.

 

And I think that is one of the reasons why more and more people like LinkedIn or they’re coming back to it, because we can get so distracted on some of the other platforms. Looking at the pictures watching the cute cat videos that all of a sudden we’ve lost an hour and done nothing on LinkedIn at least if you’re getting distracted in you’re reading business articles you’re reading articles about your industry, you’re learning about people that you are networking with and so it’s not really a distraction, right? And so with LinkedIn, what are some trends that you see businesses going after in 2019, when you see more relevant with linen?

 

Well, I’ve seen just an increase in people using LinkedIn and especially the people who use Facebook a lot and yeah, I’m still one of those people that use this Facebook a lot, so but at its… It’s getting more and more divisive especially in the world of politics as there’s just so many things that are on Facebook whether it’s sports, where there is politics, religion, whatever it is that we don’t want to be there, and we certainly don’t want to be there trying to conduct a business. So then we don’t go at all.

 

And on LinkedIn, it is something where we’re back to focusing on business there and I think that’s why more and more people are coming back to LinkedIn, and they are adding new features in a… And they’ve got… They recently added being able to do live video as a… They’re just rolling that out to some folks. I have only, I have 4 5000 contexts on LinkedIn. I only had two that currently had the option to be able to do that and I do and people love it, on Facebook.

 

So I think that’s one of the things that LinkedIn is thinking about. Plus we… It’s fun because you could do say, a conference or a speech, or you and I could be doing this as LinkedIn also, so I so I think video is a big thing and businesses are starting to really figure out that they can have the business pages there.

 

Well, they catch on. They did a Facebook. Maybe… Maybe not, but I think, again, people are moving away from Facebook, but they know that they still have to be in that digital world.

 

So, where are they going to be?

 

And I think they’re training back towards LinkedIn in an… Now, do you think as a business owner, as a…

 

I know that one thing that our clients had struggled with Facebook is that personal business life balance. And so, we had a client that they just wanted their personal profile to be their personal profile, not to post any business, in business, just to be business and nothing personal, but I feel like those ways are changing now. People you want that authentic brand. Do you think with LinkedIn, the business pages and the profile that… What’s that combination of costing ARE YOU PUTTING… Obviously, you’re not putting your cats and your kids on LinkedIn as as much as you would face to but you still fill with that personal profile that you should be implementing personal and business. And where does that business page, we come in?

 

Yeah, I definitely think that we need to include some personal things on LinkedIn because as you mentioned is about being authentic to… We all know that we work with, people we know like and trust and… And so we get to know them. I-E… Why those little personal tidbits?

 

So it’s okay to have a little bit of that on LinkedIn I… And again, like you said, we’re not posting our cat pictures, we’re not posting things like that, but there’s little ways that you can still put that in there, so maybe it is a little bit about maybe if you were at a networking event, what personal thing would you drop in a…

 

Oh man, I… So maybe it was Han on a vacation. And on Facebook, you’re going to post the 900 pictures on LinkedIn, you might post a picture of your vacation, and maybe something business, I so I-I-I-E-B-A-book. You read what?

 

Right, right, yeah, yeah, recently went on vacation. Here’s the book that I read. Some things like that.

 

The art maybe it was you had a great customer service, the example that while you were on vacation or something like that.

 

Yeah, I, he and I, I, I… People look for those they really… Again, they want to connect with people on that personal level. That’s why I say we always want to include on our LinkedIn profiles, so what we do to volunteer at a past and present, and our education alumni groups are some of the greatest ways to network on LinkedIn. There’s something about it doesn’t matter when you graduated alumni. I want to help other alumni.

 

So you want to have that in there? But the volunteer is also another great place to be able to put that on LinkedIn to show that you are involved in your community that you’re not just business. All of these various things. Yes, definitely. Well, that kinda goes into… What are the top three things that business owners or marketing team should be doing on LinkedIn to see a return from their efforts?

 

Well, the first thing is on your personal profile, especially to really make sure that it is current and that is fully optimized.

 

I see so many people’s profiles, who still look like what they posted four, five years ago when they were looking for a job, so they cut and paste in their resume and then, they never went back and updated it.

 

We have to have as much content there as possible because people are really researching people before we do business with them.

 

So you want to have all that content, you really have to have some of the biggest, like a current photo which is always fun, for women because we change our hair styles, you all these various things and it needs to be a current picture. I tell people if I’m meeting someone for the first time, I need to be able to look at their LinkedIn photo and walk up to them in a crowd, and find them to a… A professional headline that needs to not just say President of founder of You need to take full use of the 120 characters there and then really fill out your summary. That’s where I see so many people have, like a sentence to sensing your summary is where you tie it all together.

 

Yeah, that… So someone doesn’t want to read about the specific experience that you had an X-Y-Z company, or what you did here there. Even when you went to school.

 

They will read the summary, and then the cool thing that that LinkedIn added I believe it was last year maybe even two years ago, is the Banner background, that goes behind your picture, and it’s kind of an ugly blue default. Right now it’s an… And so people need to take advantage of that. It’s a billboard behind your head. So, why wouldn’t you want to have that there?

 

So that really is one of the first steps. And I really just make sure that that is current that you’re updating it and then you want to post consistently. We all win.

 

So you’re comparing say Facebook and a line.

 

We go on Facebook, and we post 20 times a day. Maybe… Yeah, that’s too much on LinkedIn, yeah, but because people aren’t really posting on Linked-In A… When you do post something that is good content, the it will stand out to because it’s just one of those things where it’s not something that people are using. So when you post and have it great, stuff, you’re going to become that thought leader, right?

 

And then the other thing is, consistency. It’s always fun to go look and see when with somebody’s last post, so I… Yeah, I only was it yesterday, was it last month was it last year? We can accomplish a lot on LinkedIn in 15 minutes. A day to…

 

I just felt in utero.

 

So, I’m on LinkedIn while I’m eating breakfast, that’s kind of my 15 minutes I can do pretty much everything I need to do. I might check in a little bit later in the afternoon, but I don’t spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and you can still really make it beneficial.

 

I love that. And going back to the first… So the first thing you said about the summary, you also put videos in what you’re carrying right?

 

You can put video you can put work samples so say you’re a graphic designer, or you can show examples of your work, because you can have files that are uploaded. If you’re, say, a copywriter, you can have things like that, you can have your brochures, all these various things PowerPoint that’s always great. And obviously if you work for a company, you need to make sure that you have their permission to be able to post those things, but in most cases, you do a right, so I… Yeah, you give people those examples of your work rather than doing get the message you contact them, and then you might remember to email it just have it there so that people could go and see it and then make sure that you’re linking to your website A… So that’s the other thing that people forget is they don’t put their own website in there so he… And you can put three so you’ll put your website links in there.

 

Yeah, so, yeah, that contact information because the best a going to go and try to find you, but they can’t connect with you, they can’t contact you and made in “opole and… Well, and I tell people, put that information in your summary.

 

So yes, it is in other places in LinkedIn.

 

The attest a C, you want to make it easy and simple to find. Yeah, I want to open it and see, Oh, there’s the contact information, a back… Don’t put it in your headline.

 

I see people do that all the time.

 

No, no, don’t put your contact information there. Don’t waste that valuable character, right, but you put it in your summary so that people… And it’s the old marketing call to action. Hey, contact me at… If you’re interested, here’s all those various things because it’s right there, it’s right in front of them.

 

because again, we get side tracked. If I have to click another button to find your contact information that I might click out of your profile and do some definitely. So we work with a lot of health and wellness and companies in the helmet, and one thing that we get asked is, we have the let’s just say it’s a chiropractic office that has five locations and 10 chiropractors it and there is a line in business page and then each of them have their only “dipoles that they’re proactive. ENT, I go Really Franco pan. Are those individual people posting to the business page or the sharing content from the business page to their personal profile? How does that work with… Like I…

 

Oh yes, I it. And because you want as much content out there as possible, right, so I… You so the first thing you need to make sure is consistent messaging.

 

So, when the doctors, the office manager, whoever it is, they need to say the same thing about the business.

 

So for example, you wouldn’t want it to one profile to say, we have five offices: another profile to say, we have 10 offices another profile to look like it’s a stand-alone office.

 

Yeah, yeah, to come up with just a little bit of messaging that has the statement about them. So, it might say here at X, Y, Z, chiropractic. Our philosophy is so again, you’ve got that consistency because people look at multiple ones is… So in essence, it would be like them looking at several different websites and they get confused, right?

 

The one in the sea, they go somewhere else, so yeah, I… But then posting their own content and… And so it is a little bit on A… You need to develop probably a social media policy as to what is appropriate content, and in a… It is, especially if you’re on your personal page, it is your personal page, but if somebody’s posting content and this doesn’t happen nearly as often on LinkedIn as it does on say, Facebook.

 

Wait, I think want to have consistent messaging, so you want… But it’s okay to post it on both places or an or be sharing from your other offices, too. So say you and I are doctors in two different locations, right?

 

You’ve got great content. So I’m going to share it on my page also, yes, so it’s just kind of about sharing those resources because we only… I always tell people, We only have 28 hours in our day, and right, so… And it’s so, I too… So I don’t want to have to spend a good chunk of my time just looking for content, so ran, I can borrow from someone else or share their content, that’s where it really comes in. And so it might be that there’s one person that manages the business page.

 

Oh, and then people share from there but then they also are seeing from their own personal pages too.

 

Yep, and do you think that sharing strategy is still as in porn on… And LinkedIn is it as our platforms, I think it is because we see a is a LinkedIn runs on the algorithms just like the other platforms. So the more interaction there is, the more LinkedIn goes. Hey, this is somebody that is very active that they’re very authentic, that they’re, they’re a big power user. So, sharing, liking all of those various things are just as important as they are on the other social media platforms. Okay, and what… And we’ve talked a lot about the business pages and personal profiles and the top things that business owners or marketing team should be doing, but what is an ideas strategy behind LinkedIn, what I think, whether you’re using it as a business owner or as a business. It does help to develop what I would have called a PR calendar or something like that. So maybe a less… It helps you when you’re thinking, “What the heck am I going to post today?

 

Yeah, so maybe Monday you’re posting an industry article Tuesday, you’re posting something that’s going on in your community Wednesday, you’re posting something about an industry trend Friday, you’re posting something about your office, whatever it is, and then you kinda stick with that, that editorial calendar.

 

Yeah, so… And they can be, again, it does make it simpler because you’re thinking, “Okay it’s Wednesday. I need to be posting about X now. Clearly, if something comes up, because we want to take advantage of situations in the news a lot of those things. You and I were talking off the air, about Al tribe, and his cancer diagnosis. A lot of times, chiropractic can be involved in something like that, so… So you wouldn’t want to wait until the next time you’re supposed to post an industry article because you’ve missed that curve, so it’s okay to change things up, but kind of plan out your strategy on Monday. I post this and A… And to me, it doesn’t really matter time of day.

 

I mean, you know, they have a tether, so we really don’t see those. Well, Tuesday, at two is the best time to post strategies anymore because then it was everybody posts a Tuesday to… And then it was overwhelming. Just post whenever, but like I said, I’m on in the morning, so that might be when I post, but don’t get caught up in that and in it, and I think that’s the thing people are like, “Well oh my gosh, I have to be on LinkedIn at 9 o’clock in the morning. I have to post an article, I don’t have an article, I’m going to not go to and then the next day, they find another reason to do it to… Not the other is a Tibetan it is, it still has to be fun because if it’s not fun, if it’s not enjoyable, we’re not going to be there.

 

Yep, yeah, you still need to give that value, to your audience. You want them to… But now I know with other platforms, sometimes there’s tools like butter or hope to be able to schedule those folks about… Do you use any of those tools for LinkedIn, or are you just having your strategy, and then posting manually?

 

I do both, I use Buffer to post some things that I know are going out all the time and one of the things that I do is a business quote.

 

Actually, it doesn’t even have to be a business quote. When I did last week was from cookie monster so so to… But it’s kind of just cute little pithy quote.

 

I do three a week, so a variety of places. So I create the image and I go into Canvas.

 

Love Canvas, and so I create those images and then I schedule those in Buffer, so I can do a month at a time, but… And as you know I also have a podcast so we have some images that we schedule for that.

 

So that’s just kind of one of those things that’s done so to…

 

I’m a firm believer that if you can schedule something it gets it out of your way.

 

So then again, you’re not subbing. They only got his Wednesday. And I’m supposed to have posted this, I… You know I schedule it out, I post for my clients a lot of times scheduling things out because I’ll get a lot of things from them, a lot of content and… And now, I don’t want to have to remember to do something on Thursday, so I schedule it.

 

So I love the scheduling programs and LinkedIn likes the scheduling program here. A, A, A, A, A, A thing with Facebook doesn’t… It is A, I like it doesn’t care LinkedIn, just like content. And it was great. We talk about these things like their people a… But yeah, linking content, content, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from.

 

So I was on that. I “asanso I have been… This is all that LinkedIn has really been around that to building your business brand identifying your business voice and not once did we mention that LinkedIn was just for jobs?

 

Because that is what we all think a ritually like you said, the beginning a new… That’s what I was started for but it comes so far. So this is really a place that business owners can conduct business connect with their ideal target market. And really, in my eyes, LinkedIn can really be a really big lead generation tool, right, I… Yeah, and it’s all about developing your personal brand.

 

Yeah, I can and I…

 

LinkedIn is great for that, because when you change jobs or careers, whatever you still have your identity on LinkedIn and you’re not having to start over with whatever it is, so it’s a great place to really make sure that your personal brand is going to rock and the other big guy on the block. Google likes LinkedIn A… And so if you look for someone’s name, you’re right. I’m going to meet with you this afternoon, so I’m just going to Google your name to find a little bit about you. If you’ve been very active on LinkedIn, it comes up very high, in a Google search. So, it’s all about creating that personal branding that will transition for years to come, and go with you.

 

Yeah, I love that, thank you so much that… Tell us a little bit more about the services that you offer on how can people connect with you, your podcast?

 

So the easiest way talk about personal branding is to go to Deb queer dot com Deb I-E-R dot com, and there are links there to my podcast, which is the business Power Hour, which is a ton of fun and a lot of good business tips there, but I also focus a lot on linked-in trading and so we have LinkedIn, for C-Suite, which is a program or program services that we provide for executives, but you and I are executives also whether we have a company of one or two or a company of thousands, we’re leaders in that company, and so LinkedIn, for S-C-suite, it’s one of those mornings we just as a LinkedIn for C-suite is all about how we create that personal brand and we have that great profile and we got several different services that we provide here.

 

Whether you want to do it yourself, because it a… We can do that. Or if you’re so busy that you just don’t have time we can create that profile for you. So I love it, awesome, at I-E-career dot com.

 

Awesome, thank you so much for your time. I E-Go.

 

This has been wonderful yes, and guys I highly recommend connecting with her podcast are great. And I just think, again, LinkedIn is such a growing platform that the most of us raise your hand if you have a profile, you haven’t updated it, and over a year go to your LinkedIn profile, today, take these tips and update it today.

 

So I think you have a line.

 

And with both of us on like a… Please do, I have a great day,.

Social Speak Podcast chris carr with Farotech

Farotech is a comprehensive, growth-driven digital marketing agency that implements a systematic approach to lead generation, nurturing and conversion by utilizing scalable web design, cutting edge inbound strategies, and creative video development.

In this interview with CEO and founder, Chris Carr, we focused on inbound marketing, web design, and video marketing for the healthcare industry. We covered:

  • How Inbound Marketing, Web design, and video for large orthopedic brands relate to short-term and long-term strategic marketing decisions.
  • Current trends for wellness practices with SEO marketing in 2019.
  • Tactics that were expected to perform well or had a lot of hype, but failed to take hold in 2018.
  • The effect of video on digital marketing for healthcare.
  • The top 3 things that a wellness center should be doing online to see a return from their SEM efforts.
  • The top strategy that should be followed, but often marketing teams get wrong.
  • Marketing strategies Farotech is currently testing that many other agencies aren’t implementing for their clients.

Please be sure to subscribe to the Social Speak Podcast for more interviews with experts in digital marketing for health and wellness businesses. To learn more about Farotech, click here.

I had a blast during this interview with Chris, and was blown away by how in depth and actionable the information was that we discussed. Some key takeaways included:

  1. Don’t just change your website if you think it can work better to reach the KPIs you’ve identified for your practice. Install software to create Heatmaps. These heatmaps show how prospects are engaging with your site and allow you to test different layouts and understand how design effects conversions. [6:50]
  2. Dive deep into your buyer personas or patient personas. Your goal is to create content that creates an emotional connection about how their life can be after they come into your practice. Cast a wide net, but also tap into individual niches. [14:23] and [27:01]
  3. Though you will benefit from a professional video on your homepage, lower cost, authentic videos for asset pages or pages that answer commonly asked questions about your specialties. These can then be repurposed for a variety of uses. [16:45]
  4. Dive into both Local and Traditional SEO tactics. First consider the commonly used, but less competitive keywords to grow your domain authority, then progress to the more competitive keywords when writing your blog content. Additionally, create and follow an editorial calendar to be more Proactive in your marketing rather than reactive. [32:11]
  5. Hiring a scalable team of specialists can be less expensive that hiring employees in house. [3:18]

Transcript of Podcast Episode with Chris Carr

Hello and welcome to the newest social speak podcast episode. My name’s Caitlin McDonald and I am one of the co-founders at Social Speak Network and today we are joined by Chris Carr, the owner and founder of Farotech, a Gold Star HubSpot partner. Farotech, is a comprehensive growth-driven, digital marketing agency that implements a systematic approach to lead generation, nurturing, and conversion by utilizing scalable web design cutting-edge inbound strategy, web design, and creative video development. So, let’s give Chris a warm welcome as he joins us on this podcast episode.

Caitlin McDonald: Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chris Carr: Yeah, thank you, thank you for having me.

CM: To kick this off, tell us a little bit about your background in digital marketing.

CC: Well, I started Farotech in 2001, so it’s been nearly 18 years and we started out just as web development company. It was just myself and then, eventually one other individual. Now we have about 50 people working for our agency and we service companies throughout the United States in healthcare who are business to business, business to consumer, you name it. We started about 18 years ago, it started out as a web development company. And then the natural progression would be “Hey you know what, you guys create a really great website but nobody can find it.” And so we went from a web development company to really getting into SEO. And then the next progression after that was, “Hey, you create really great websites. I’m on the first page of Google, but for some reason my phone isn’t ringing, my email is not blowing up, what do I do about that?” And so we spent the latter half of the last 18 years really, talking about conversion science.

Hitting traffic at the wrong part of the buyers turning they’re not going to convert. So it was really important for us to solve the actual problem that they had not just give them marketing ease or marketing answers because that’s easy to do. The sales are down. I’m like, “Yeah but I got… Yeah, 100 Facebook likes.

CM: Right exactly, those vanity metrics aren’t going to cut it anymore.

CM: Your business, Farotech, focuses on inbound marketing, web design, and video for large orthopedic brands. Can you describe how the three of these relate to short-term and long-term strategic marketing decisions?

CC: Sure, well let me share my screen.

One of the things we try to do is, we try to really affect the hiring decision and reason why I’m saying that is that the average orthopedics practice usually might have one person who’s in charge of marketing. And when you see on the slide here, you can see my computer, correct? [3:18]

Marketing is moving extremely fast. The expectations have never been higher. Most marketing directors expect their health practice to be on the first page of Google. They expect it to be a thought leader. They expect you to have a social presence, you name it … Basically, the list goes on and on and usually what happens is orthopedics go and they hire a marketing professional or CMO or something like that, and we call that person, it’s a HubSpot term, but they call a Marketing Mary a Marketing Mary wakes up one day and realizes that all of this stuff is more than a one-person job. And so they need support.

And so what happens is, is that Mary usually finds a content writer and then they maybe tap on the shoulders of a social media vendor or something like that. All the PowerPoints and all design stuff still needs to be created. So maybe they might have a project manager doing that.

Then you have a web designer and basically you’ve stressed your web guy and everything has to look pretty with graphic design, what happens is you wake up one day and you got a lot of money going out the door. We sort of got the niche is we do what’s got a team-based solution and the team-based solution allows your marketing person to still stay in place, but we become your team behind that marketing person.

And so what happens here is with the really large or small practices need to scale, but they don’t want to hire five people to do so. So what they do is, is they hire an organization like ours that is scalable and we’re able to do all the things that they don’t have time to do.

A lot of times we bring our expertise and our approach to it, but sometimes it’s just that we have the time that they don’t have.

How does it affect the short-term, in the long term? Well, the short term is, is that we try to implement a strategy, but the long term is that we hope to be your solution to scaling your marketing team.

CM: Great, great. So providing those the quick positions that need to be filled, but also long-term growth of the team when the organization is growing as well.

CC: Yeah and then they like it because if they don’t like their writer, we can deal with it.

CM: Well let’s jump into trends. What current trends are you seeing for the health industry with inbound marketing in 2019?

Current Digital Marketing Trends for Orthopedics Practices in 2019

CC: There are a lot of trends and one of the things that I wanted to talk about is fighting the trends first and then adopting the trend second.

So usually what happens here is, let’s pretend like it a website company or a decision to basically take on a marketing campaign.

Usually what happens is that if you see you on the bottom left corner, you go and you create a really great website, right? [6:50]

Website Evolution for Orthopedics Clinics

And then what happens is, is that a lot of Orthopedic practices get really busy, and then they don’t continually evolve their website. And so a couple of years later if someone’s like, “Oh well, you know what, we really need to create a new website” and they do. Maybe two to five years later. They create another website in another website. But if you were really ask some hard questions, like What did you learn from website number one that made you decide that you needed website, number two, what about site number three?

And usually what happens is that they don’t really have a clean answer they just know that it has to be better than it is now, and obviously graphic design ages with time.

It’s pretty funny. I can look at a website and think oh look 2007. What our view is that every time you change that website or that campaign, it’s like reinventing the wheel.

But if you can basically be in a scenario, like you’re seeing here, you can develop a system and a foundation. If you look at the orange line, we recommend that orthopedic practice develop a strong foundation and then make micro adjustments along the way. learning and learning and learning and learning. And so, let me show you how we do some of that continual adjustment.

CM: And just for everybody listening to the podcast I will create a link that goes directly to this place of the video so you can see that graphic as well, so that will be down in the description. [8:20]

CC: So usually what happens here? So I go and I built that website. It’s the foundation, right?

I usually recommend that orthopedic practices put on heat mapping. This is about one of my clients, but this is their old website. You’ll notice that one of their critical buttons had no… Basically, no high balls on it. Or basically people’s mouse proofs as were going there, and they spent a tremendous amount of money and effort on these videos, but the people go into that, so they had to make adjustments, on the website and they did. Other things that I got graded on is how many appointments could I get for this organization?

You notice 15% of the audience. Did they scroll down far enough?

We do the same testing and mobile.

You look at all the clicks that they’re going to do, of a variety of different filters such as search terms. What part of the country or how long are they take to click? So the ore in a new drip marketing is going to be better to know it at 6 O’clock at night or 10 AM on a Tuesday morning.

  • We look at every KPI that they do, and we basically try to make adjustments on each of the smaller goals too.
  • We look at mouse movements to find out what parts of the website are confusing. We look at your forms to figure out why people aren’t converting.
  • We look at pages that aren’t converting and try to create attribution pages, and then later on, we’re going talk about video, but I’ll talk a little bit about it.
  • What we try to do is as we try to look at videos and we have a scale to figure out our videos too long or people dropping off at certain points.

So when you know all this usability data about your website essentially what you’re able to do is you’re able to create basically a system that if you imagine it’s like a spear you’re making this spear sharper and sharper.

Heatmaps help your practice to understand how you health center website helps you reach your digital marketing KPIs.

CM: That makes sense that absolutely makes sense. So creating new heat maps is actually something that any website can have on them. There are different apps out there, different softwares and programs out there that your team has access to and can just install a code on your website so you can start gaining traction and insights into how people are actually acting and reacting to your own website.

And so Chris, thank you so much for bringing that up. It’s so important, rather than having a new person, a new marketing director come in and say “we need a new website,” really think clearly about what those goals are and see how your websites currently performing compared to those goals. because you might be surprised that the thing that you think everybody’s clicking on not getting a single click.

CC: Yep, we’ve adjusted words on the home page and a five to 10% up-tick. Honestly, sometimes we did it by accident” on for measuring and so we’re like, “Okay good.”

CM: Exactly. And it might not work the same way the next time, but for that one center it works great.

So, you brought up video, so let’s jump into a video. Can you tell us how video effects, digital marketing and what you’re seeing with video right now?

Video Marketing for your Health Clinic

CC: Sure, well, I think the first thing you want to probably say we are using the word orthopedic practice but if you’re a healthcare and let’s just say it’s interchangeable, but I’m going to keep using that word.

So they were on a level playing field. Essentially, what you’re kind of doing here is, is that in terms of video, you need to realize that each practice is unique.  So a lot of times it comes down to the quality of care, the quality of outcomes, the resources as the technology provided all that stuff. But at the end of the day if I tore my ACL I need my ACL fixed that. So one of the things that’s going to be really important is that you are not only your home page, but also your specialty pages really trying to display differentiation.

And so, we do this in a couple different ways. The first thing we want to be able to do a video is you need to know the way the audience thinks.

And what I mean by that is that there are different parts of your buyer’s journey, such as the beginning stages, you are in the awareness stage, and then later on, as the pain lingers on or you’re really in a spot where it’s critical, you’re in the decision level stage.

What we try to do from a video perspective is a video that’s neutral to each of those stages, but that explains how you’re different from other practices. Very simply – as simple as we can.

Use simple videos for your digital marketing – our attention span is only 7 seconds.

There’s this running joke that I tell our beat to death is that the average goldfish has an eight-second attention span and the average human has a Seven second attention span.

Essentially… we’re losing to gold fish.

So what that means is that it’s really important when they come to your website that you give them the information they need as quickly as possible, and in different formats, because some people are readers, some people are video watchers.

I personally am a video watcher, I don’t know what it is, but one of the other things that video gives you the power to do is, in my opinion, if you were to say what is in marketing is a race to emotion.

And earlier I can get you involved in that process, the more likely I’m going to get you to convert. So of course, they want to get their ACL fixed, that video is going to say, “Do you want to dance at your daughter’s wedding?”

It doesn’t matter why you’re here, what you want to be able to do is life beyond treatment.

So we try to create videos that are going to do that, but we use the technology in a really cool way as well. The first thing we do is we use a technology like this to find out how long videos should be. [14:23]

You’ll see that on the top right-hand side, you’ll see that this graph is dragging down to the right. Alright, you’ve seen the video over to the left. But through critical calls to action, whether it’s at the beginning of the video, the end of the video or even 15 seconds into the interview, I’m able to collect people’s information into our database, so we could drip market to them.

What’s really cool about this is I’m able to find out who’s watching my videos by name. So if you have these two case studies here you have Oliver, who watched 98% of the video.

Utilize drip marketing and remarketing to individuals based on how much of your video they watch

So if you’re going to talk about treatment options at the end of the video, Oliver knows the full story, now, 10 Bailey as you can see here an OR and she’s wrong a couple of times but he’s only watched 59% of the video.

So what our system will do is is that when Tim leaves the website, we’re going to be able to deliver emails about features and benefits and cost of progression in testimonials, things like that.

Yeah, there’s going to be this blanket statement. I do need to make early and so I do. You’ll get comments and crazy stuff, but I… Obviously, HIPAA does apply. So make sure that you’re getting counsel on how you communicate. We’re well versed in this but just know that we know, that heaters, not only to you but also to us as your agency, yes, is that an important thing to point out? You need to make sure that you are HIPAA-compliant with everything that you’re doing when it comes to collecting names and email addresses and re-marketing to them. But this is pretty incredible that you can even tailor that follow-up series based on how far they’ve watched that video.

CC: Look at kind of explain a little bit more on video.

So let’s say a patient is your site map in the buyer’s journey that I explained before using an ad, you’re going to have awareness, consideration, little content and decision level content.

We do something and lead core in which basically means we give visitors a certain level of points for every time that they come to our website, and they embrace it. Engage with marketing. So, what we’re able to do is we’re able to… We’re able to find ways where individuals come to our website and so they go to our hand and wrist page, assuming they’ve got a cookie on their computer, when they leave, the website and email automatically gets kicked out to them and that email we’ll have a video in it, that’s 30… 60 or 90 seconds long.

So what we’re trying to do is get video in the hands of as many people as possible, and if they haven’t gone deep enough into our website to get the critical assets, we create a system that if you’re not going to come down so we’re going to get it to you.

One other factor that I would say here is we also to try to develop these asset pages. [16:45]

What asset pages are, are all the most frequently asked questions or common objections about a certain treatment, area or something like that, but they’re all on one page. But what happens, this is the one they click on that answer that question we have a video that plays for them that is maybe 60 or 90 seconds long. What we’re doing is we’re giving them quick and simple information in a format that is digestible. Because it’s a video format I can use that asset on my website, I can use it in my social media, I can use it in my drip marketing, I can use it in apps, you name.

So the more video assets that I can create sort of the better scenario, that is a better outcome, I can have.

CM: And so, I’m going to stop you right there. So one thing that we hear time and time again, is to re-purpose content so video Chris is describing that video is such a great asset to have in your database because you can use it over and over again, you can use it on the website to answer question, social media, email marketing, and apps, really all of all of the different channels that you could be marketing on video fits in there. So thank you for bringing that up. Is so important to reiterate that don’t spend your energy trying to recreate something new for every single channel, you use the same thing that you’ve already created.

CC: That’s right, yeah.

I think one of the reasons why we always say that is because the research and the original writing is the most expensive part of the journey. So why do you keep repeating the most expensive parts when you’d rather be really solid on one critical area and then be in a scenario you’ve created great content that I can scale rather than just constantly… We use a phrase here we call “making the no nuts.

We were in a spot in 2015-2016 when the Google hadn’t totally grabbed a hold of quality versus quantity, we were at a spot as a company, we were putting out about a thousand content pieces a month.

And what I mean by that is that Don’t do what I did. My point is focus on great content.

CM: Okay, so were there any tactics that were expected to perform well or had a lot of hype but failed to take hold in 2018?

CC: Yeah, and nobody’s going to like this, but social media.

So if you were to check out some of the largest orthopedic brand in the States a ton of money goes into social media. [20:24]

This is a Forbes article and this talks about the… And if you’ll notice right here and he calls it the reach Apocalypse. A Jason was on to something. And it’s something that we’ve experienced essentially, what it means is, is that we go and we really try really, really hard to get Facebook likes or things like that, right?

The reality is, is that Facebook is a publicly traded company. And so let me read this one line here.

It says basically, organic reach. Which you’d think I’ve got a 1000 people to like my page everything I post a thousand people are going to see it. And you are in for a wild ride here. You would be lucky if it’s like 11% of the people seeing the content.

Organic Reach on Facebook Moves Inversely to Facebook’s Stock Price

I’ll read this. As organic reach dropped from approximately 12 to 6% (and now often at 1%) Facebook’s stock moved from nearly $50 to nearly $70, adding billions of dollars in marketing capitalization.

What does that mean? Facebook wins when they show your audience less of your materials.

The result  is go on Facebook, go on social media, we’ll get your content to your audience. You just have to pay them to do it.

So all these companies, all these practices go, we have to get really big and social media.

Well, for what? Unless you’re willing to pay for social media, you’re not going to see results. Now, you absolutely have to do it, but you do not bet the farm on it.

I’d much rather my double my energy on SEO, paper advertising, content marketing, establishing yourself as a thought leader, PR, all that stuff, rather than resting all my hopes and dreams on social media.

CM: It’s one of those things that you still have to be on social media, but just don’t think it’s going to change your practice.

CC: This is the approach that we use [23:22].

Alright, so we believe for all practices that you need to know who your buyers are inside and out – your ideal buyer patient personas, then you want to be able to do a thing we call usability conversion notes. It was all that heat mapping stuff didn’t show – How are your clients resonating?

SEO, content strategy, lead nurturing, which most practices do not have. And I can talk about that social media, but only if you were on the pay-to-play, then you still do it but you just don’t do it nearly as hard. Have a really firm grasp on your analytics and your data.

Some value –added services, I usually call this video, and pay per click advertising budget provides it, yes, what you’ll notice here, as I’ve mentioned, almost everything in the marketing circle, if you believe in silver bullet marketing that says, “You know what, I’m just one SEO campaign away from it,” you’re wrong, you need the whole thing.

So if you were to make a cake and you just… I don’t know, I’m not a baker .. focus on one ingredient, but everything else was horrible. It’s going to taste terrible.

Yes, but we do it all the time, in marketing, because it’s sort of a path of least resistance type of stuff.

Don’t rely on just one marketing effort to grow your orthopeadic practice

CM: Yeah, and you hear of that one case where just focusing on email marketing transformed the practice, that’s one case, it’s not everybody. So maybe you’re going to find that one email sequence or the one way that you can use email to really transform your practice and I do believe email can transform your practice, but at the same point, you’re going to have to do all this other digital marketing to see what combination works for you in your own business.

CC: I would I couldn’t see it any better.

CM: Okay, so what are the top three things that medical centers, orthopedic Centers, should be doing online to see return from their digital marketing?

I think you kind of just nailed it on the head with this description right here, but are there three bullet points, things that marketing team should be focusing on?

CC: Yes, I… Let me show one [25:35] and then I’ll talk about two.

Obviously with orthopedics, you’re going to have a wide net, right, you’re going to… Let’s say, daily, you have multiple specialties at your organization, so that’s hips and joints, and spines, and other stuff like that. You want to cast as wide a net, as many patients as possible it.

And as many patients as possible to your practice, but other things that you want to be able to do is you want to be able to find niches within or communities within your group and get really solid with those communities. So there’s one of the large orthopedic practices is low kid in Philadelphia, one of our clients, one of the things that they do is that they find these sub-groups of these niches and they communicate right to the heart of that niche. They’ll do that with a number of different things. What they do is they create marketing materials directly to that niche.

So, right, not only do that, they also so market to the influencers. Because in behind a man with the pain, there’s a wife who’s tired of her in about.

Narrow down your audience to niches and then work to build influencer relationships and created tailored messaging that fits their buyer journey

So what happens here is that what we try to do and we recommend you do, would you probably won’t because it takes time, is is that you literally sit down and you have a really hard… A really deep dive into who are your buyer personas? [27:01]

Left hand side, we want to ask were really great questions about who are it patient personas, and I want to be able to find out is how do the answers to these critical questions change from one patient persona to the next patient persona.

Because what you don’t want to do is have a one-size-fits-all marketing plan. If I have a torn ACL, I don’t want to hear about your spine center.

I start hearing about knee pain and my conversion rates are going to go way up.

We want to basically find niches in communities and we want to market to them about the things that matter to them, most rather than just blanket. Due statement marketing that we hope that resonates with all.

CM: So do you feel as though it’s best to take your time, just go through all of these different patient personas, and then choose the one that you feel is that lowest hanging create all the resources for that and then slowly create all the other resources. If you don’t have the time or the budget to have a team like yours jump in and create everything at once.

CC: Well, obviously, you want to make sure that your foundation is good. So I talked about the wide net. Don’t go in unless you have the wide net.

Let’s pretend like you do have the wide net, what I would probably try to do is try to find organizations that would fit multiple buyer personas.

And what I mean by that is, let’s say hypothetically, I’m just going to use a random scenario here. Say I want to market specifically to roofers with bad knees or climbing a ladder. It’s a tough job.

A lot of individuals who have torn their ACL or hurt their knee really bad they get treatment, from a Northrop practice. So, you’re communicating to roofers and you’ve got them for needs. What’s great about… Well, not great, but let me rephrase this a tendency that also happens, this is that once they get their new fix their hips next. Same with baby boomers. Same thing with student athletes, or athletes.

So that the… Yeah, so if I market to a niche of baseball players because I’ve got a really great shoulder department, that’s a really great idea.

CM: So what are the next two things that you recommend?

CC: Obviously, we talked about video. What I would recommend you do is have a really strong home page video, but the other videos that you do well, it might feel like you’ve really lowered the bar. I would rather have a lot of content, even shot with an iPhone right that is very authentic.

Then you saving up all year long to create a 1000 videos over and over and over again, so you can buy a 20 microphone from Amazon, you connect it with an iPad, your iPhone. What I even recommend again, is there’s 15 the disease gambles so you don’t have shaky hands-on I but what I do is, is that I would just have these candid interviews with doctors in your practice or physicians.

Start to talk about just issues better in relevant at the time or tendencies that they say, “You know what, let’s say Lindsay Vohn, she takes a nose dive at the Olympics, right?”

Get a doctor, and says, “You know what, looks like your knees really banged up it’s like, “Well let me tell you, this is something the tendencies that we see with skiers because your feet are clamped in it. torques and then it’s the first thing to give because it’s a, it’s a pliable it’s plantings, like that. go a long way in a in…

So we talked about buyer personas, know your ideas, we talked about video. And then the other thing I would probably say that you would need to do is that you want to be good at two forms of SEO.

One is local SEO with your pin packs and your maps and then the other one is more organic SEO, and let me give you a real quick, I’ll give you my hand pitch on SEO real quick. [32:11]

Alright, I usually… What happens here is that if I’m a knee specialist I need to be found locally with these local impacts, and then I also want to be found organically.

Understand the difference between Local SEO and Traditional SEO

Now what happens is is that there’s a different science for local SEO than there is for traditional SEO, so if you’re going to work with a vendor make sure that they know the difference.

Okay, so, so when I’m talking about… obviously you want to be in a scenario where you’re getting the best keywords.

These are the keywords that everybody wants. Everybody’s going to type in to find your services.

The problem is, is you’re probably not the only orthopedic practice in town and there’s also national providers or at least real providers that have much deeper pockets than you, so they’re going to try to gobble up the sky screeners. These are the really big key words, right?

Yes, so what we recommend is to try to get found on the first page of Google for a number of other keywords, keywords that have really high visibility but with less competition, and what we’re able to do is that you’re able to reach a tipping point.

So if I’ve gotten clients on the first page of Google for hundreds of keywords, I’m increasing what’s called my domain authority. And then once your domain authority, reaches a certain level, you’ve essentially to earn the right to be heard in the eyes of Google.

That means is you can actually go after some of these skyscrapers later on because you’ve sort of earn that klout.

Other things you need to know is if there’s algorithm changes, and if you cheat to try to get to the top, you’re going to wake up one day and you’re going to see something like this.

CM: Now, when you are focusing on as is this in addition to the site structure, are you creating content that’s tailored directly towards those long-tail keywords that aren’t those big skyscrapers, but kind of those lower-tier ones that’s right, some longer-tail keywords are sort of the smaller buildings.

CC: Yeah, I so what happens here is, is that when you start to go after a lot of keywords here, I blocked out the name of this client, but when they found us, I basically they were promised around a 25% increase in the number of keywords on the first page of Google.

We’re able to increase that to 247%. It translates to traffic.

Yeah, no work word. You do the better to where you do it. Basically, it works.

So, this organization just their blog alone, we were able to get them to increase in entrances by 856% or 63000 people were reading their blog to now over 607,000.

I might say, “Well how do I know that’s even quality traffic? Well, I increase their pages by 639%, so people were staying on online 700% or 600% longer. What we believe is the more educated consumer usually converts.

CM: Yes, now with this, I can hear a lot of Marketing Directors seeing these numbers and saying, “Oh my gosh, there’s no way that I can do that.” Can you give us a perspective of how many new pieces of content you created for this organization?

Utilize Editorial Calendars to remain Pro-Active rather than Re-Active with your Inbound Marketing Efforts

CC: Yeah, now this was over three year. The first year, I was the mill. We do about three blogs a week.  Those are all SEO optimized blogs, and stuff like that.

We write everything in collaborative documents.

Everything should be connected to an editorial calendar.

You would know, what’s going out in the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, a year or whatever it is. So you are proactive rather than reactive.

One of the major problems I see what practices they start out, they can get all fired up to get into marketing and then fires happen and then you look at their blog and it’s like the last blog was in 2017.

No, it just gets away from you. But if you live and die by an editorial calendar, you’re going to create content.

But what’s great about the content that you produce, is that a lot of companies will have technology that will allow you to optimize for a certain keyword and, you’re probably not going to have the in-house, but vendors basically marketing companies will say with technology like this that I’ll say, “you know what, before this contents even published Live to the web, I can see the rating here is poor. I can see that the readability is below the target, and just even the number of words on the page is less than the 840 where Target wooly using two out of the 20 keywords that need to be used.”

If I loaded this I published this piece of content I should have no hope that it’s going to be the competition, right? So this software is going to basically look at the top 10 results and it’s going to say, “You know what, you’re going to have to be critical adjustments.” It’s better to know this early rather then publish and pray.

CM: Yes, and that is one of the reasons why that editorial calendar is so important is that you can write that blog a month two months, however long before it needs to be published so that you have the time and you’re not feeling that “time Prince before you click Publish to actually look at these stats and everything, to say. Oh, you know what, if I just click publish, it’s not going to do anything for my business correct, yeah, right. So what is the top strategy that should be followed? But often, marketing teams get wrong?

CC: They try to do it all in-house.

Even if she’s working 180 hours a week, or is that possible at Ellen in A, the I alone the Lorimer is she doesn’t go home, she just works, right?

Yes, I can be able to be a specialist in SEO. It changes every day. She is not going to be a specialist in social media. It changes every hour. So what happens is, is that you need to make sure your marketing person is the quarterback who’s running a team of specialists and those specialists only focus on their area of expertise.

You can get a team-based system for the price of hiring one other employee.

If you imagine that Mary marketing is one employee and then the whole team is just another employee, the price you’re paying an initial team is about comparable to hiring a second employee, it’s scalable.

It’s profitable, and it’s fireable.

CM: Yeah, I oh yes, absolutely. shift the blame to someone else.

Oh goodness, let’s see… And I just have it just a couple more questions for you. You’ve shared so much valuable information for our listeners.

You founded Farotech and it’s now a top ranked inbound marketing agency. Do you want to just dive into your company and services a little bit, give a little pitch?

CC: I think the sales pitch that we would say is, is that we are truly partners. By being true than partners is if you’re looking at you, the company, you’re hiring to do your marketing as a vendor right, you’re always going to treat it like a vendor and the results are going to act like a vendor.

Now a partner is responsible for the things that you are responsible for. So if I’m the CMO and my job, my dependency is about getting appointments, making sure that critical physicians are seeing, you’re opening up a new practice, making sure that I have enough walk through traffic, digital traffic, whatever it is.

I want to make sure that as a partner that they’re on the line for the same things. And that is what we do and I, we sort of put ourselves in the line, we find out what matters to you most we bring strategy, we bring people but we bring accountability.

Yeah, and that’s the critical part for us is that our butts are on the line too and so if you’re going to walk out on the ledge we’re going to walk out there with… So you yeah, and so how do we plug ourselves? Would you really great work?

We obviously see we had really very results we work a really large brands, but we also work with some medium such brands as well.

But what’s exciting for us is just the transparency we have with our clients. It’s funny I got married and I had clients that weren’t even invited to the actual wedding come to the actual reception. I’ve got clients that call us and say, “Hey, what do we say about this particular treatment area?” We’re so ingrained that you know what I mean.

And so, then they do a critical they say they’re going to expand they come to us first, because not because we’re getting the commission, but they come to us first so they know what data they need to know before they make decisions, and that’s what I live. A good partnership looks like. And what I believe a good vendor looks like, and I think that’s what a good marketing company looks like.

One other thing is, is that I hire, I love the 99.9% of all my employees. I hire really great people that are passionate about their clients. That’s important because you’re going to spend, you spend most of your waking hours behind a desk, so right, so if you don’t love what you do don’t work here at Farotech and don’t work for my clients.

CM: Yeah, great, I love that. And then lastly, to wrap this up, are there any marketing strategies that your team is currently testing that you think other agencies might not be implementing for their clients?

CC: Yeah, one of the things that we’re trying to do right now is being a scenario where we’re doing a little bit more outbound email.

So here’s what happens. Let’s say, hypothetically, on your patient intake form they work for a really large provider, say a pharmaceutical company, right?

So oftentimes, we don’t go back and look at our database as the source or the well of where people are. And so what happens is I can go back and I make sure that I ask “Who is your employer?” And I also ask what your business title is. And the reason why I’m doing that is because if I know your employer and I’m able to get email addresses to your employers and do lunch and learns at your employers.

That’s a really good thing. So I want to be able to go to each of the large providers in my area and be that guy that practice, or that organization.

I want to be in a scenario where, let’s say, the medically, it’s a C-level executive, I can’t guarantee it. The people at the bottom of the totem pole are in the same place as the C-level executive is. So I want to know how quality is my list. And if their middle-of-the-road, or the title feels been on the road I freeze it.

Other things that it does is it says, you know what, if this guy went to my practice and his insurance basically he’s covered by his insurance at my practice basically his insurance is valid. I know that everybody else in that company.

That’s right, that’s right, and right. So I’ve been doing orthopedics for a long time, my wife has to drag me to go to the doctor’s office, drag me like literally, I know better. I know you have to figure that for every patient you have, there’s 10 patients that have nagging pain that are just like me, that just refuse to get there.

So if I’m going to get you a market and create really critical arguments for an idiot like me.

CM: Well Chris, thank you so much for your time, thank you for the valuable insights and information that you’ve been able to share. Are there any questions that you feel I should have asked that I didn’t?

CC: No, I think usually what happens is, is that the first question I get is, “How long does it take?

It really depends on how much do you want it? If you’re willing to put it in the hard work, and get your foundation straight and get your blogging straight and consistently stay proactive not reactive, and you can see how your results work by the 90-day mark, and you can know how it should progress.

If you are sitting in the dark, if you are not in a scenario where if you’re a reactive marketer we’ll never know when this is going to pay off.

Get that editorial calendar, get focused, work hard, and know what the next 90 days, six months, one year.

CM: Thank you again, Chris, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show, thank you, I appreciate it. It was wonderful, it was a wonderful experience for me to know right I so thank you again to Chris with barite for joining us today it was such a pleasure hearing about his expertise and about some of those tactics that you should be implementing for your own health center.

So again, my name is Caitlin McDonald, and please tune in for a next episode of The Social speak podcast.

What Makes a Strong Social Media Content Strategy

How many of us spend more than an hour per month planning content for our social media platforms?

If you are anything like me or I should say how I was in the past 😉 I had all these great ideas and topics I wanted to talk about, pictures I would want to stage, videos I wanted to shoot, blogs I wanted to write, the list goes on, and then I would get caught up in work & life! Yep, and forget to implement all these awesome ideas.

In today’s day and age, it is so important for your business to have a clear and consistent plan with social media. As we all know social media is always changing or adjusting something if you don’t have a clear plan it is easy to get lost in mess. 

It’s easy to say you are going to block time and put together your strategy for the year, but honestly, does that happen?

Each year I love to check out what the social media trends are going to be for the new year, and what the experts think will change, or what will be needed. We then as a team take that advice or tips and implement them it into our own marketing strategy.

whats your social media plan?

But, did you get into business to follow social media trends? I don’t think so, that’s why you are here reading this blog now!

Your social media content strategy is something that does take time to plan, I am not saying it is going to be easy or happen in an hour, it does take a little leg work up front to really dive deep into your brand/business to identify which direction you need to go in. Listening to your audience, monitoring insights, analytics, and talking to your customers and/or clients. 

Each social media platform has its own personality and your audience will engage with you differently on each platform. So it’s important to look at each platform as its own entity and create a content strategy around that platform. Now, some content will be able to go across multiple platforms, but if you do that, put that content out on different days.

I am not a huge fan of the same post going out at the same time to Facebook, Instagram, Linked, and Twitter you see it 4 times and that doesn’t give your audience any true value.

If you are sharing a blog post create a few different posts that you can put out to the social media platforms.

Before we dive into the 4 ways to create a strong social media content strategy, I wanted to talk a little bit about blogging and how that feeds into your social media content. This is a piece that is often overlooked, below we talk about setting goals, one area is building website traffic. If you are not blogging about valuable content on your website, what entices people to want to click over to your site?

We have put together a FREE Blog Sharing Checklist that you will also be able to implement into your social media content strategy.

Download Our FREE Blog Sharing Checklist

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So, let’s get started, today, we will be covering 4 areas to create a clear and consistent content strategy for your social media.

Let’s start with Goal setting

When it comes time to create your goals for your social media, you can think of SMART goals

SMART is an acronym for:

  • Specific: Your goals should be clear, simple and defined.
  • Measurable: This is where analytics come in. You want a goal that has one or more metrics.
  • Achievable: Is it achievable or is it not possible within your resources?
  • Realistic: With your current resources of time and money, is it possible to achieve your goals?
  • Time-sensitive: Every goal needs a time frame, whether it’s one year or several months.

We recommend you look at monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. You want to think of these different areas:

  • Brand awareness – with over a billion people on social media daily, yes daily, you can check those stats here, it can be a little difficult to stand out from the crowd. Looking at social media to help build brand awareness is a great idea. There are a few components to building brand awareness that we want to think about when writing down our goals.
    • Identifying your target market
    • Building a good experience for your audience
    • Increasing engagement
    • Creating conversations with your audience
  • New Leads – When it comes to social media people are always looking for the ROI, the key factor is what does ROI mean to you and your business? New leads can be new email signups, new clients, people that are looking at your shopping cart, subscribed to a content upgrade, or even blog followers. This is where the SMART goal setting comes into play, it’s important to be very clear on what the new leads mean to you. 
  • Traffic to the website – This is a piece I love to monitor each month, it’s amazing how much traffic we get from our social media platforms. If you have Google Analytics on your website it monitors the traffic sources so you can see where people are coming to your website from. When it comes to setting a goal for website traffic, it helps to use % like I want my website traffic to grow by 35% of views coming from just social media platforms, or I want my website traffic to increase by 50% from sharing my blog posts to Pinterest etc. 
  • Building community and brand authenticity – This is a big trend for social media right now, and I shouldn’t call it a trend but more of a value. It has been brought to the attention of business owners and brands all over that people/your audience want to know WHO you are. What your business or brand stands for, being a transparent and authentic business or brand allows you to create a loyal community. At the end of the day, our social media platforms are our online communities. I always think of social media as an online networking event. It takes time to build relationships and it’s a two-way street. You need to engage with your audience, ask questions, active listening, and much more to build this community. What does an authentic business or brand look like for you? How would a strong and loyal online community benefit you? 

Content Strategy

Now, that you have your goals defined, it’s time to put the content together that your audience is looking for. With social media platforms saturated with all different types of content and updating less than every second, it can make it difficult to stick out from the crowd.

You want to give your audience value, content that leaves them wanting more, you are the expert in your industry and people want to do business with YOU!

How do you create a clear content strategy? 

We must first define your brand’s voice:

  • Look at your company’s core values
    • What important to you?
    • What is your demographic, and how do they speak?

Then we can move into how to bring that voice into storytelling, let’s be real, people love stories! Every good business and brand has a good story behind it!

  • Humanize your brand
  • Share stories about your brand
  • Work on connecting with your audience on a deeper level
  • Share relevant content that relates back to your core values and brand

Now, we dive into keyword research and finding the pain points of your target audience. Finding out this information is NOT to create a bait and switch strategy, but again, to really connect with your audience on a deeper level and find out where their struggles are at so you can create valuable content around their needs.

Here are a few tools to help with keyword research:

How to find your audience’s pain points for you to solve:

  • Ask your current customers/clients
  • Create a survey and send to your email list
  • Ask your social media followers

You always want to have a good mix for your social media content strategy and being consistent. It’s great if you take the time to craft together this amazing post that gets a TON of engagement and then you post NOTHING for over a week, that one badass post serves NO purpose now.

Going back to the point I made earlier, keep your audience wanting more!

Types of content you want to create

You can do this by getting creative with your content.

1- Blog posts
2- Products
3- Videos
4- Company personality
5- Curated content or industry news
6- Gifs
7- Events or networking events
8- Original photos
9- Testimonials
10- FAQ
11- Content upgrades or free resources
12- Podcast or books
13- Company milestones
14- Inspirational quotes
15- Fan content
16- Infographics
17 – Employee/Owner stories
18- Power/Referral partners
19- Product reviews
20- National observances days, Nation # day, National Awareness day

I love getting creative and providing our audience with awesome content that they can implement into their business.

Content Calendar – bringing it all together

The fun part is creating the content, thinking of all the different topics, ideas, videos, pictures, etc you want to use for your social media strategy. The hard part is being consistent and having a plan. As you can see this is a process and it takes time. 

Take some time and find a system that works for you, there are plenty of tools out there that we have used and recommend to help you and your team stay on the same page.

Tools to look at:

Tips to thriving with your social media content strategy: 

We have created a simple Google Sheets content calendar that allows us to stay organized. Content Calendar Template – Content Calendar

So, I did a little research

When I started on this blog I did a little research to a few bloggers/influencers to see where their struggles were with digital marketing and how they have overcome them.

I asked these 3 questions:

1) What are the top 3 struggles you have faced with your digital marketing strategy?
2) How have you found Social Media and Blogging to help your business?
3) Where do you feel you need to most support with your marketing on a monthly basis?
Our Responses: 
  1. Fit Bottomed Girls said the top 3 struggles they have faced in the digital marketing world have been – Getting through the digital noise and clutter, Defining a clear budget for marketing, and Converting readers to customers of our own products.

    Since their business IS blogging social media and blogging play the most important role in their business, it has allowed them to establish a brand, a community, a voice, and a platform!

    Where they said they needed the most support was driving in new traffic and sales copy.
    logoJennipher Walters CEO/Co-founder, Fit Bottomed World LLC jenn@fitbottomedgirls.com | http://fitbottomedgirls.com/

  2. Tabitha Blue with Fresh Mommy Blog said her top 3 struggles she has faced in digital marketing is time – making the time for everything, putting all the ideas together and keeping it consistent, Once she writes the blog post, now what with writing  captions for sharing blog posts to social – eye-grabbing and appealing that makes people want to click through to full blog, and lastly figuring out the right topics people want to learn about.

    Again, this is a lifestyle blogger and her business revolves around her and the brand she has created. She has been able to empower mothers all over the world with her content.

    Where she said she could use the most support was creating systems for sharing blog posts, best times and days to post along with having a consistent social media strategy.
    Fresh Mommy Blog This is her happy place where motherhood, food, travel, design, and stylish little things collide. Tabitha is a certified life coach, mom of four and she wants to empower busy women + moms to feel organized to do more of what they love… and feel confident to do it in style! Website: https://freshmommyblog.com/  Email: hello@freshmommyblog.com

  3. Dee Gautham Fitness said her top struggles with digital marketing are finding the balance between personal and business, writing posts around self-expression and still giving the reader enough value, writing purposeful content, and optimizing for revenue vs. followers and what’s that sweet spot.

    Dee is a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, Nutritionist, Online Coach, published author, and speaker on women’s body image and self-confidence expert, she works with her clients in a group setting or one on one. She has found that Instagram has been the most beneficial to her brand and building brand awareness, really being able to connect and engage with her audience. She is only blogging twice per month but feels that is something that will grow as she grows more.

    Where she said she needed the most support is having a consistent strategy with social media and blogging, self-expression and sales.
    Dee Gautham The mission of Dee Gautham Fitness is to help women get in the best shape of their lives – physically AND mentally – so you can feel, look, and perform your best, and reach your highest potential in this world. https://deegautham.com/

In conclusion, you can see there is a theme about taking time to create the right content strategy and staying consistent with it. Once you do the leg work, in the beginning, it is easy to add more to it and adjust each quarter.
Don’t overwhelm yourself with trying to do a whole year at once, but work on a quarterly basis. Ask yourself, is it time to regain control of your marketing? We have the solution for you!

Often marketing managers and business owners feel as though the content they are creating doesn’t drive the business towards a set goal.

Content is created in a haphazard manner and there isn’t enough accountability or guidance to make sure each aspect of a digital marketing plan is as effective and efficient as possible.

This is why we created the “Roadmap to Digital Marketing

We’re experts in content creation, SEO, email marketing, sales funnels, WordPress development, and social media. We also have exclusive access to new cutting-edge resources and trends in digital marketing.

Our clients rest easy knowing that their marketing efforts are being handled in the most efficient and effective ways possible for their business. With monthly accountability coaching and quarterly content calendars, we help you to make sure your entire team is following best practices and has access to training materials and tutorials.

Would you like to set up a FREE 30-minute consultation to learn more about this solution for your business or to see what pointers we can give you on your strategy?

Book your FREE session today

We hope you are as excited as we were to create your strategy!

xoxo

What Makes a Strong Social Media Content Strategy_

What Makes a Strong Social Media Content Strategy – SMART goals, brand awareness, building an authentic brand, and more!

 

Podcast Interview on Inbound Marketing in 2019 with Abby Thompson from Salted Stone

This week we have the privilege of speaking with Abby Thompson from Salted Stone, a Diamond Tier Partner with Hubspot. Salted Stone is a global agency with an award-winning team. They provide end-to-end solutions for clients focusing on strategic marketing programs, tactical support, and project engagements.

In our podcast, Abby and I took a deep dive into some of the key concerns for health and wellness centers when tackling Inbound Marketing.

In this episode, Abby provides insight into:

  • Current trends she is seeing for wellness practices with inbound marketing in 2019.
  • Tactics that were expected to perform well or had a lot of hype, but failed to take hold in 2018.
  • The top 3 things that a wellness center should be doing online to see a return from their digital marketing efforts.
  • What is the top strategy that should be followed, but often marketing teams get it wrong.
  • Inbound strategies Salted Stone is currently testing that you don’t think many other agencies are implementing for their clients.

Please subscribe to Social Speak Podcast for more interviews with experts in digital marketing for the health and wellness industry.

Before jumping into the transcript of the Podcast, I wanted to highlight eight key takeaways that you can implement in the digital marketing strategy for your wellness center.

8 Ways to Master Inbound Marketing in 2019 for your Wellness Center

Takeaway 1: Inbound marketing is a comprehensive journey. It is about creating opportunities for your target market to find you and interact with your brand in a way that encourages them to take action.

Takeaway 2: Current trends in Health and Wellness for Inbound Marketing in 2019 include building authenticity into how you position yourself online. For example, wellness brands are moving away from partnering with Influencers that alienate their target market and working more with people who welcomes and builds trust.

Takeaway 3: Not all technology trends played out in 2018. Salted Stone expected AI to be much more advanced for content creation, but it still is failing to create content that seems authentic to the brand. Additionally, be on the look out for more advanced functionality for Chat Bots in 2019.

Takeaway 4: Wellness centers should focus their digital marketing efforts on creating Interactive Content. Interactive content increases time on site, prospect engagement, and ultimately helps to build trust with your brand. Examples include: quizzes, calculators, dynamic landing pages, product or service walk-through videos, and more. In general, clinics with interactive content at the center of their digital strategy see a higher ROI than those who don’t emphasize interactive content.

Takeaway 5: Encourage user reviews and value the transparency and authenticity of both positive and negative reviews. Don’t hesitate to incentivize patients to leave reviews about their experience with your practice.

Takeaway 6: Track the correct KPI’s, such as your customer lifetime value to your customer acquisition cost ratio. Vanity or glamour metrics, such as the number of Likes or Shares a post receives, won’t move the needle when it comes to best marketing your practice online.

Takeaway  7: Marketing is not a one-size-fits all proposition. A health clinic in NY may find that different marketing tactics work to book appointments than a wellness center in OH. You need to dig deep and understand your ideal patient.

Takeaway 8: Don’t think you need to be everywhere online. Talk to and interview customers and prospects to find out where they spend their time. Then, focus your Inbound Marketing efforts on growing these channels. Be strategic about where you market yourself and what tools you use.

So, with that covered let’s jump into the Podcast to hear from Inbound Marketing specialist, Abby Thompson.

Inbound Marketing Tips Interview Transcript

Caitlin: Hello and welcome to the newest episode of The Social speak Network podcast. I’m Caitlin McDonald, and today I am joined by Abby Thompson. Abby is the Director of Marketing at Salted Stone, a global agency with an award-winning team of humans, and dogs, where she spends her days spearheading lead generation and strategic initiatives. Abby is a Boston native with a passion for mission-driven business development, branding, and technology. So please, let’s give a warm hello as we welcome Abby, to the podcast.

Abby we are so excited to have you on today, first to kick things off, can you tell us a little bit about your background in digital marketing?

Abby: Yes, absolutely, thank you so much for having me on. I’m excited to be here.

Prior to joining the team at Salted Stone, I was working with a sustainable and renewable energy education company based in Portland, Oregon. We offered online courses for engineers and professionals who wanted to learn more about solar and wind energy and sustainable building. I was responsible for assisting with editorial campaigns on our blog, social media marketing, sourcing, managing experts, building courses with them, and answering questions from prospective students, as well. I got a chance to handle initiatives that followed all ends of the buyer journey.

I created Inbound content for marketing purposes, and also used chatbots to qualify leads and even sell to site visitors, worked with the instructors to build a new courses, and then sold and cross-promoted to them.

It touched on marketing, sales and customer success, as well. After I left that company, I joined the team at Salted Stone about two years ago. I started as an intern and then I worked in our PR and earned media department and now I lead marketing specifically for the agency. I’m a little bit less client-facing now, and I’m really in charge of lead generation and strategic initiatives over here for our agency.

C: Awesome, I love it. So you’ve really been able to have your hands in all different aspects of digital marketing, and now you’re really just marketing the business, which is great.

A: I’ve got to work on the business and in the business which is really cool.

The Difference between Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, and Inbound Marketing

C: Salted Stone focuses on Inbound Marketing, can you describe how this differs from content marketing or digital marketing? There are so many catch phrases out there. What are they?

A: There are so many buzz words. From a high level, Inbound is a technique that really turns the old-school concept of pitching, advertising, and finding and courting leads or buyers on its head. So where in the past, you were always making cold calls, buying leads lists, trying to push your message with an outbound approach, now you’re creating opportunities for folks to find you and interact with your brand in a way that encourages them to ultimately take an action. So, of course, content marketing, content creation, and dissemination of the content that you create are a part of Inbound Marketing.

Certainly a tenant of Inbound is to write or design really helpful guides, blogs, e-books that folks will find and enjoy. And in that process, of course, they’ll get to know the product or solution that you offer, but Inbound is about a lot more than that, really. It’s ultimately about optimizing every domain you have on the web to move people closer to the point of sale, or to renew, or to evangelize your brand and come back again and tell others to come back again.

Whereas digital marketing itself, might be an umbrella in which a lot of these actions, fall, Inbound is really about creating a comprehensive journey. So say someone finds you on the internet because you have a great website that’s keyword optimized with good domain authority.

And maybe they’d spend some time clicking around, chat with someone on a live or scripted bot, look at the resources you might have to offer, download something, maybe they get enrolled in an email marketing nurture workflow and eventually, hopefully, you become your buyer. It’s really it’s a bigger picture, long-term mode of thinking for brands rather than just focusing on SEO for example, or a lot of folks, they just say, “Oh you know what, I’m going to blog…” It’s really much more comprehensive than that.

Flywheel Approach to Marketing from Hubspot

The folks over at HubSpot, who coined the term, they call it now the Fly Wheel way of thinking. Basically the customer is at the middle and then around the customer is sales, marketing and customer success alignment. So you’re making sure that from the point of time where they’re finding them on the internet to when they decide that they want to spend their money with you, you’re really making sure that they’re happy, that they love your product, still that you’re being consistent in your messaging, as soon as they become a client, and just making sure you’re investing in equal measure in all parts of that journey for them. That’s really what Inbound is about it.

Current Inbound Marketing Trends for Wellness Practices in 2019

C: Now, as you know we focused a lot with health care and health and wellness what current trends are you seeing for wellness practices with Inbound Marketing in 2019?

A: Yeah, absolutely, I think we undeniably live in the age of an elite and often unrelatable influencer or social media star, and I think prior to now, many brands have made the assumption that the star power of a person endorsing your product or your service is enough to persuade buyers. But the truth is most wellness or fitness influencers don’t really live life like your buyer does.

And I think you are sending a message with a little bit of dissonance there. And I think marketers have now really caught on that. It sends a sort of phony and unattainable message to have people who don’t live anything like your buyer promoting your product, or… So now I’m basically saying wherein companies embrace this idea, and really tailor they’re Inbound initiatives around fitting their initiatives into the lifestyle of the whole market. Not just that one demographic that can live like those influencers. And to me, that just makes business sense it. Why make your club, the club that only a few people feel they can connect to or join. Why not eliminate those sort of alienating messages and images and open your brand up to folks who want to spend money with you.

Because so many people in the past, if you’re just using sort of elite Influence or marketing, many people probably felt that they weren’t welcomed, or desired customers of your brand.

C: I love that, it’s creating a much more authentic presence for your business.

A: That’s right, And there’s so much to be set of course for using powerful influencers as sort of like an aspirational sort of token. I think that’s powerful still, of course, and there’s so many influencers that are fantastic and very real about their lives and everything, but I think I’m seeing a lot of wellness brands really understand that maybe it can be influencer with a little bit of user-generated content sprinkled in then showing real people using your product or your service ultimately, I think the best word of mouth, comes from your friend on Facebook, who’s probably not Kendall Jenner, with all due respect. I think the authenticity carries. I think people know it, and they recognize it, and they appreciate it.

Marketing Tactics that had Hype in 2018 but Failed to Take Hold

C: A great insight, thank you Abby.

What tactics that were expected to perform well or had a lot of hype around them but failed to take hold in 2018?

A: Beyond what I mentioned before, one that we’ve seen and it isn’t necessarily specific to the world of wellness or fitness, but really, it got a launch through marketing is the role of artificial intelligence in content creation, specifically.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Content Creation Still isn’t where it needs to be in 2019.

So I know at the onset of 2018 we were seeing all these new tools and software is being rolled out and we were expecting folks to be using more of those machine learning services that for example would turn out keyword packed blog posts or write ad copy for you.

It seems like the technology really is isn’t fully there yet, where the whole AI component, just isn’t quite sophisticated enough to write like a human and in many cases, it’s really quite expensive still.

So that’s something we figured we’d be coming up against a lot and contending with a lot and it just hasn’t taken all the way I think many people expect that it would.

C: Oh very interesting. A recent to study did just come out by co-schedule saying +67% or more of marketing directors felt like they didn’t have the technology that they needed in order to really have a robust content marketing strategy. [Actual Fact: Marketers who use automation tools say time is the biggest barrier to advanced marketing while those who don’t automate say that budget is their biggest barrier. (Openprise)]

It’s interesting that you’re talking about the AI and content creation and how it really doesn’t seem like it’s lived up to the hype. So it’s probably not the right product that the audience or the market is looking for.

A: Yeah, it’s true and we’ve seen a few examples and it’s almost the technology in some instances, when it’s applied incorrectly can create sort of no offense intended, but remarkably bad blog posts where you can tell that no human had any part in the creation of it, because it’s just a string of words that doesn’t really make a lot of sense when put together. I have faith that I’ll get there, it’s just it hasn’t taken off the way folks thought it would in 2018.

That goes back to that authentic presence too, do you want to just have a blog post out there or do you want to actually capture your voice, and your brand and draw people into your story?

C: Were there any other tactics that you were expecting to perform well last year and just didn’t live up to the hype?

Obviously, there’s still a lot to learn about, and this actually kind of still falls under the AI cannon, but there’s a lot for us to learn still about chat bots and about live chat and the things that it’s capable of. I certainly wouldn’t say that it didn’t perform or didn’t live up to the hype, but there certainly is a lot more to learn in terms of using chat bots to lead qualify and things like that. I expected that a lot of the products and tools would be a little bit more sophisticated at this point. And they still many of them still have a lot of components to be built out.

The Top Three Things a Wellness Center should be doing online to see a return from their Digital Marketing Efforts

C: Yes, absolutely a great point there. So let’s jump on to the next question, what are the top three things that a wellness center should be doing online to see a return from their digital marketing efforts?

A: Yes, great question. The first is in our opinion and what we’ve seen work for our agency and for our clients is just use interactive content.

Use Interactive Content on your website and in your marketing to see a return from your digital efforts

Offer quizzes, calculators, dynamic landing pages, blog posts with clickable interactive elements, products walk through. These have just proven to result in infinitely higher engagement. We’re seeing better conversion rates, and in some cases, they allow marketers to close more deals. Our statistics around adding interactive components to sales proposals and how that has increased the likelihood of people closing. These interactive component pieces also encourage folks to stay on your website or your page longer, and ultimately that’s beneficial for many reasons. They’re more likely to consume the information, they are likely to want to spend money on your product or service, but ultimately, time on page gets factored into how high up on a search engine results page you’re going to sit.

If folks are spending time, using a quiz or a calculator, clicking around, really enjoying that user experience, it is also going to factor into how you rank on Google or Bing, or any of those search engines.

Interactive Experiences creates an exceptional ROI for your healthcare center

So invest in interactive experiences from marketing to sales to success, it’s just an exceptional ROI because there are so many tools out there now that really enable users to make this type of content without breaking the bank.

We’re agency partners with a couple of really great tools that have enabled us to make this kind of content and do it quickly, but still make it beautiful and effective and genuinely helpful and interesting for folks who come to the site.

C: It’s almost as though five years ago or so, everyone was all about social media in order to have a conversation and to communicate with your prospects online. Now, it’s really about having a conversation with every single thing that you do online, whether it’s a calculator or questionnaire…

A: And let people have the power. I mean the cool thing about interactive content is that it enables the user to decide what they want. Blog posts and e-books have a very important place and they’re not to be overlooked but ultimately when people read them, the brand that they’re reading it through is talking at them.

There really is an opportunity for them to abandon that and just decide they’re going to do something else, but if you’re offering something like an interactive product walk through, and that’s if you have the software or if you have a physical product to great for both that’ll kind of enable folks to at their own leisure figure out what it is that they want to be learning more about.

And it also, on the back end, if you have great reporting set up, it really tells you where your visitors are spending the most of their time as well. So we’ve rolled out interactive components for software companies, or for physical products, and it’s enabled us to really see “Oh Wow. People are interested in the hardware” or people are interested in something we might not have even necessarily known would be a point of differentiation.

C: Yes, the power of data.

A: Yes, for sure!

C: Data driving every decision. So even if you have a strategy and a plan set up, the data may point in a completely different direction.

A: That’s right and you can’t fight the data.

C: We talked about the use of the interactive content. Are there any other efforts that wellness centers should really be focusing on?

Encourage User Reviews on Yelp, Amazon, G2 Crowd, and Google to Build Trust and Authority

A: The second thing I would say is to make sure that you’re encouraging user reviews on sites like Yelp, Amazon, G2 Crowd, Captara, Google and make sure you’re demonstrating those reviews in your marketing collateral. There’s remarkable power in social proof, what we call social proof. And we believe that consumers today really should look at user reviews, as a trustworthy source of insight. As marketers, we know that a lot of the content that we’re reading on the Internet has been funded or branded by a company looking to sell a service so it’s really important that consumers, today, take a look at what actual users are saying.

So we’ve been crafting review strategies on behalf of our clients, and for our own purposes for a while, and as long as we’re asking for honest feedback, and showcasing all truthful testimonials, even the ones that don’t really make you look like the best brand in the world.

Those bad reviews will happen, of course, we’re all people, but as long as you’re asking for that honest feedback, there’s no reason not to incentivize reviews as well. You can show them off on paid ads, and emails, on your web pages. People trust people, way more or then they trust brands and if authenticity is kind of the unintended theme of the day, there’s really no more authentic route to go than to just give people the choice, and the opportunity, to talk about your brand from a real-world perspective.

Make sure you track the correct KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to truly understand success in digital marketing

And then the final one is really to make sure that you’re tracking the right key profit indicators, KPIS, or Key Performance Indicators. We found that it’s so easy to pay close attention to what we would consider more like glamour metrics like engagement on a social post or identifying which of your email campaigns garnered the most clicks, but ultimately some of the more technical metrics will help you glean a solid picture of the return on your investment and really figure out where to invest that money going forward.

One of the ones we’ve been paying closer attention to now is looking at your customer lifetime value to your customer acquisition cost ratio. Which is kind of a mouthful, but it’s really important because it measures the relationship between the lifetime value of a customer, how much they’ll spend with you over time, and the cost of acquiring that customer. It’s pretty easy to determine with just a little bit of math. You just divide the average lifetime value in dollars by the average cost it took to get most customers through the door.

C: This is so powerful. Let’s take a step back for a second. So let’s say you are a marketing director at the healthcare group down the street.

A: Yeah, this seems like something very difficult to transact.

C: And for me, I love data, so I’m all were just jumping in. What tools should these health centers use?

Most health care centers do have some sort of custom or software where they are able to see and how many times somebody comes in the average cost of their visit, so that’s really adding that up over the whole life cycle of the patient that’s coming in. That would be the customer lifetime value correct?

Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio = Average Lifetime Value of Patients / Average Cost to Get New Patient Booked

A: Yes, exactly. So that is going to be, whether it’s a service or a product, it’s really going to be throughout the lifetime of your customer. And that usually obviously, I mean life time with your brand, not the entirety of their life, but that value that they’re going to add in the entire time that they choose to work with you.

If you sell the products to see and how many times they’ve bought that product, if you tell a service, that’s how many times they’ve renewed or upgraded, it’s really just the amount of time that an individual is going to spend with your brand over the course of the time that they work with you.

C: And then in that acquisition cost is something that say they came through a paid advertisement, right?

A: And then there was a, the depending on the length of the selling cycle because of course it… It’s drastically different if you’re “B2B or “B2C it’s drastically different if you’re a software versus a service. That’s really going to vary quite a bit, but figuring out how you acquired that customer. We do this often by persona, we won’t look at an individual that it would be hyper-granular and a little bit difficult to make the patients so we’ll do it by persona. I will take a look at how much a certain group of people have made our clients and then we’ll pay attention to how much it caused to bring those people on.

And if it’s an instance where we know that a huge group of folks came through, say Instagram advertisements, we can break down the cost that we allocated towards Instagram ads, and compare that to the customer lifetime value by just dividing those two numbers.

C: You don’t need to have a person-A, person-B, person-C really, you’re looking at your practice as a whole, just to get a sense of what that percentage breakdown looks like in the ratio looks like there.

A: Exactly… And so we, for a real world example, we at Salted Stone, were a HubSpot Diamond Tier Partner, so we get a lot of leads and a lot of interest coming through the HubSpot partner directory. So if you know that a certain segment of our leads come through there and they spend X amount of money per year with us or over the course of their lifetime with us, we could take a look at what it cost us to have that directory listing at HubSpot, and to keep it maintained, and we can figure out that ratio. That to us has lead to some incredibly important business decisions. I mean, in a situation like this, it’s “Okay. We know that we have a lot of money coming in through that great partner directory. How do we make sure that we’re still adding value there? How do we make sure that we’re allocating our funds to keep that active?” So it’s really, it’s helped us inform some of the bigger decisions we’ve ever made.

Salted Stone as your Trusted Inbound Marketing Agency Partner

C: Yeah, that’s great. Now tell us a little bit more specifically about what you do as a Diamond Tier Partner with HubSpot. Tell us about your services and your company.

A: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll give you the higher level picture of Salted Stone first and I’ll talk a little about our involvement with HubSpot, as well.

So we’ve been around for over a decade now, we’ve got to all over the globe, we have FAO teams in Australia, in the United States and in the Philippines, and hopefully within the coming year we’ll actually be spreading out even more. So that’s kind of exciting. We call ourselves, a lot of people ask what it means to be a full service digital agency, and we call ourselves that because ultimately we really do everything for our clients and we do it all in-house. So if you need a website, a marketing video, a custom CRM integration, I mean a direct mail campaign sale systems, even training for your business development, everything from logos to booths decor for a conference. You can come to us and we’ll take care of it all with the team that really gets to know the context of your industry and is deeply familiar with your goals, and that’s the benefit, really. I’ve also working with teams that keep everything in-house, is that they can share that information with each other.

For example, if we have a designer creating an infographic, for you that designer has been working with the account manager and the people who are focusing on your brand voice and the folks who help you identify what your new fonts are going to look like. I mean everything, we keep it all within the team, and that’s led us some really, really cool brand experiences for folks. Additionally, we scale our services up and down in terms of that scope size, so we can either be your fully embedded strategic partner where we’re basically your marketing agency of record or we can just produce a one-off deliverable for you.

So that’s a very long-winded just about Salted Stone, and we’ve been a Diamond Tier Partner, I want to say for about three years now. But we’ve been involved with the Hubspot ecosystem for closer to six or seven. Basically our CEO when we started off, we were just a Search Engine Optimization agency, we were doing a lot of work, but just making sure, websites were getting in on that early algorithm for Google and ranking highly, and then, we like everybody else, noticed the shift where folks for getting pretty tired of constantly being advertised too, and wanted to instead learn more and make decisions for themselves. That really empowered consumer mindset took hold at Salted Stone, for sure. So we decided to invest in Inbound and invest in HubSpot as a tool that we use and that we deploy for clients. And it’s been a really, really fantastic partnership. They just have an exceptional team, and exceptional product, and it’s been amazing working with them.

We certainly work with companies outside of HubSpot, as well, part of Salesforce, Marketo, really whatever folks need we’ll take care of it. So we’ve talked a lot about Inbound in this episode, and HubSpot is the parent of Inbound it’s where it all came from. So we’re really so thrilled to be connected with that with that organization.

Unknown Inbound Strategies that can put your Practice on the Map

C: Wonderful… And as a business, as a whole, are there any Inbound strategies that your team is currently testing but you don’t think other agencies are really implementing for their clients?

A: Yeah, a good question, and I actually, I talked to our strategist, all the time now that I’m not as client-facing as I used to be I talked to our strategies all the time, about some of the more outside the box initiatives, or things that they’re doing that they’re really excited about that’s working for their clients, and what always emerges is really one central theme and that’s Salted Stone works from where our clients’ businesses are at, from a maturity perspective, to move forward.

A lot of agencies take a sort of one-size-fits-all approach to strategy.

When you do that, you’re really not immersing yourself enough in the context of what needs to happen next in order for a company to grow. So we’ve worked with some B2B companies to combine what would be considered kind of more analog modern call center tactics with hyper-personalized, email workflows or retargeting.

We’ve done direct mail campaigns, we’ve been crafting strategic event or activation campaigns that use micro-influencers, so thought leaders of specific to spread a message. And those are folks would say, 20,000 followers, not 6 million followers, so we’re constantly gathering context, we’re constantly meeting companies where they’re at in their development and trying to set all these really realistic, but often still really aggressive goals instead of just making it a sort of canned approach to marketing and that’s not at all to put down those agencies that are taking that approach because of course, in many instances, is absolutely going to work. But I just… One thing that our team is really, really good at is making sure our clients understand where they’re at, and we do that through ways that I think sometimes surprise them a little. We do really comprehensive stakeholder and customer interviews, we talked to thought leaders and influencers in the industry sort of independent of our clients, we make sure that we paint a really complete picture of exactly where they’re at and make those steps really tangible for how they can be moving forward in a way that’s smart. That way they’re allocating budget towards things that have staying power towards growth that is sustainable and scalable, and I think that that’s one the… A lot, I see a lot of agencies not do quite quite as much, and maybe that’s less so a differentiator and it’s just me being very proud about the fact that it’s worked really.

I think it’s so important. I didn’t really understand where customers are now, and where they want go, understand their unique customer set. It is something I feel like a lot of agencies talk about, but don’t necessarily do.

I think often, even happens with sort of in-house marketing teams, as well. Where it’s kind of viewed as a nice-to-have, and not a need-to-have to keep refreshing your understanding of where you’re at in the market and who you’re selling to, and what they want. So I, I think there’s this idea in marketing that your key selling points are fixed and your buyers are always going to be looking for the same thing and your differentiator is always going to be the one that resonates, but that’s simply not the case. And you have to be constantly asking for feedback, for reviews, for honest discussion about who you are in the market, and ways you can be better reaching people and meeting their needs and I think… And taking that bespoke approach to work with our clients has just been better in the long run as well for a relationship with them too, because it garners trust when you’re able to just be honest and say “Here’s where you’re at, here’s what we suggest, let’s work together to make your goals or reality.”

C: Absolutely, that’s a breath of fresh air that you do that. Thank you to everybody in the industry.

A: Oh no, thank you, thank you so much.

The key marketing strategy most wellness centers get wrong

C: I meant to ask this earlier, actually. What is the top strategy besides not doing these customer reviews frequently enough, but what some… One strategy that should be followed by a Wellness Center, but often marketing teams just get it wrong or decide that it’s not a priority when it should be.

A: Yes, absolutely. So I would say the sort of top strategy that I see happening a lot, we do get a lot of clients who are very concerned with and rightfully so, because they’ve been showed messaging that indicates they should be, but they’ve been very concerned with making sure that they’re on every platform, all the time. That they’re pushing out content, that they are absolutely churning, they are investing in the newest technology, they’re on every feasible social media network, and that’s a message that we understandably take in and think we need to apply to our business, because all of these social networks, all of these tools, they’re trying to sell to us.

Of course, you’re going to believe that if your Pinterest profile and your YouTube account and your everything is not immediately up-to-date, you’re going to believe that you’re going to fall behind. But the truth is taking time to genuinely identify the channels that your leads are coming in by, or that your ideal audience is hanging out around that is so important and it leads to much better decisions for how to use your bandwidth and how to use your budget.

It’s easy to fall prey to the idea that if you are a software company, you have to be doing webinars.

It’s easy to open the idea that you need to be advertising on LinkedIn, but that might not necessarily be how folks are going to find you and how they want to interact with you.

I would say that a one-top strategy is just making sure you know your customer and you’re constantly updating your customer.

But be strategic about the way that you invest your money and your time and do it all feel like you need to be everywhere across the internet.

Don’t try to be everywhere online – choose those channels that already engage your target market and fully invest in nurturing relationships there

There are many markets where it doesn’t really make sense to keep an active Pinterest profiles, and there’s many markets where it makes sense to not run advertisements everywhere.

Just be strategic, how I have a really strong vendor evaluation in place as well. We certainly do in-house here, but we just have a checklist of things that If we’re deciding to work with a vendor, either for ourselves or to use with our clients, we’ll go through rounds of phone calls, demos, we’ll bring in different members of our teams, we’ll have comprehensive checklist to make sure that this investment we’re making is one that’s intelligent, scalable, and going to work for everybody. It’s so easy now to find all of these companies that claim to really be a the solution that’s going to get you a head, when the truth is if everyone saying, that it certainly can all be true. So, be strategic and don’t feel like you have to be everywhere.

It’s something that we see brands do a lot and while it often doesn’t necessarily hurt to have platforms everywhere, it’s just a lot of time and often a lot of resources and a lot of money that you could be directing towards something that brings in way more value and get you in front of the right people.

C: Yes, absolutely, and something just to tie on to that as well. If you do decide that Instagram or YouTube or LinkedIn, is going to be the place where you’re going to reach your customers stick to it, don’t just… It works, the strategy for two weeks or a month or even three months. Stick to it and pay attention to the data.

A: And hear people out, always trying to make sure that a lot of our e-commerce clients, and a lot of our B2C brands, we always make sure that, say if they are running a Facebook, is it integrated with marketplace is an integrative with shop.

If they’re running ads, are they doing it in a smart way? Are they constantly responding to messages from a customer support perspective? If folks have questions about a product or they need to return something, is that omni-channel operation set up correctly? Because if you’re going to be investing in something, social media marketing is just a great example because there’s so many things you can do, is it now if you go at any… So, if you are an ecommerce brand and you’re going to be investing in something like Instagram or Facebook, just to make sure you are truly doing it right, you’re listening to customers, you are constantly running searches for your brand name, and any sort of sentiment, run sentiment analysis, use listening tools just pick your avenues and make sure that you have made them as robust and sustainable as possible.

C: Great, great well… Abby, I am just blown away by the answers that you gave. Thank you for being so transparent about what your team is doing for clients as well as what clients should be doing for themselves with their own in-house marketing teams.

Is there anything that I should have asked but I didn’t?

A: No, this is perfect. I think it’s all really comprehensive grouping of questions, and it’s made me think so much about our business in a way that’s really cool. It’s been really fun to step back and think through how we do things here. So thank you so much for having me. This has been really great.

C: Wonderful, well we really appreciate you coming on the show, as a guest, and I will be sure to add the link to Salted Stone to the description as well, so listeners, if you want to go check out Salted Stone, I do urge you to. They are a great, great agency and as you know they take care of their clients.

Thank you again to Abby for joining the show from Salted Stone. We talked about a lot of really important topics for your healthcare practice, and your marketing team to follow. Really it is all about creating an authentic presence and tailoring your Marketing Strategies, directly towards the consumer and directly towards your ideal target market persona.

One of the things I loved, is tracking the correct KPI’s – What is that customer lifetime value? This is something in your tracking software, you’ll be able to pull that.

Just take even the number of clients that come in over the course of a year, and divide that by your profit or your revenue for the year, then take a look at all of your marketing expenses. This is just such a simple way to find that ratio between the customer lifetime value and the acquisition cost.

Go out there, make sure you’re focusing on a strategy that makes sense for your unique clients, your unique target market, and don’t try to do everything. Focus on what’s going to really make a difference and have an impact for your business.

So, thank you again to Abby and I will see next time on the Social Speak Podcast.

Is your Content Marketing Plan Failing your Business, Editorial Calendar 2019, #nationalholidays #businessevents2019

This blog breaks down the difference between a Content Marketing Strategy and a Content Plan. It then dives into National Observances that your team should consider integrating into its content or editorial calendar.

As we’ve worked with hundreds of businesses as they work with digital marketing to reach their business goals, we’ve found that more often than not there is a disconnect between what they are trying to accomplish and what actually gets done.

The reason?

A lack of planning for how to implement the content strategy causes content to be created in a vacuum. The content is not written to achieve a specific goal.

Originally I was going to write this blog to only focus on the difference between a Content Marketing Strategy and a Content Marketing Plan, but keeping your sights on external and national events is critical to participating as a relevant source of information in the digital world.

Let’s start by diving into a Content Marketing Strategy.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is the Why behind the content you are creating. It includes identifying why your team is creating content, it is the vision you have for future content that is to be created.

This strategy should also identify who you are marking content for. Are some pieces of content designed specifically for prospects, referral partners, or clients? How can you differentiate between them? What are the goals of them? How will you position and use them online?

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

To start creating your Content Marketing Strategy, set your goals.

We recommend thinking first about the issues you may be facing as an organization and then set the goals as a way to solve these.

For example, we’ve worked with clients in the past who wished to use digital marketing to fill their schedule. After diving deeper, we recognized that they weren’t remarketing to or rebooking current clients as effectively as they could. As a way to capture low-hanging fruit, rather than creating content to educate and gain interest from folks whom had never heard of the client, we redesigned the content marketing strategy to focus on engaging with current and past clients.

Common goals of a Content Marketing Strategy include:

  • Increasing Revenue
  • Attracting leads
  • Lower costs
  • Better customers
  • Build an audience
  • Educate

Once you have identified a need in the organization and set a goal, it is easier to recognize alternative solutions to reach the goal.

Another aspect of the Content Strategy is identifying what tone you wish to take. For small businesses with only one or two content creators this can be easy. Do you speak in the first person, do you use past or present tense, are there branded keywords you should incorporate?

The last part of the content strategy is identifying which digital marketing networks to pursue and who to target on each network.

What is a Content Marketing Plan?

A content marketing plan is tactical – these are the actual steps you will take to implement the marketing strategy. In general, we never recommend creating a digital marketing content plan without first creating the strategy.

Why? You may realize after 6 months that the content you are creating has nothing to do with the goals you are trying to achieve!

We see this often with teams.

The director states that each week a blog needs to be written and at least 3 social media posts need to be published each week. However, the marketing experts creating the content don’t clearly understand how their piece fits in with the larger marketing strategy. What is the end goal of the content?

Key aspects to a Content Marketing Plan

The content marketing plan should include topics to cover, calls to action to include, specific promotions, who is responsible to creating various pieces of content, and how content will be published.

In our work, specifically the Roadmap to Digital Marketing, we recommend formatting the bulk of a content marketing plan like an editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar for digital marketing allows your team to easily see how content fits together and what topics should be talked about at certain times during the year (hence my inclusion of the National Observances list below).

Content Strategy and Content Marketing Working Together

As described above, a Content Strategy always comes first and the Content Marketing Plan is built based on the goals identified in the strategy.

One of my favorite examples of how a strategy and a plan work together is if an issue within an organization is that the close rate for new sales is lower than the industry average. The goal here may be to increase the close rate, boosting the bottom line.

After researching and  surveying clients and prospects that decided to pursue another option, it becomes clear that the alternative tends to be a business with more name recognition.

How can content marketing help to shift the perspective and gain more trust? Here the strategy is to increase brand recognition and trust. The plan could be to create more videos with leadership and to incorporate blog posts that dive into company values.

This brings us to using relevant topics as a part of your marketing plan.

Being Relevant with your Content Marketing Increases the Effectiveness of your Digital Marketing Plan

If you are like 98% of our clients, one of the key goals identified in your content marketing strategy is to increase brand recognition and position your organization as an industry influencer.

Incorporating National Observances into your Marketing Plan is a key tactical decision your company can make to achieve this. Of course it is up to you and your team to decide which ones to highlight and how to incorporate them (podcasts, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, promotions and sales, etc).

Some, such as New Years, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas may all seem like obvious choices, but are they actually identified in a calendar?

Does someone on your team know that they are responsible for creating content 3-6 months in advance of these dates?

Then there are industry-specific days, weeks, and months. For example, if you are a health center and realize in February that it is American Heart Month, you are already late to the game.

You’ve missed the opportunity to reach new audiences by being a guest on a Podcast or having a guest blog post published in an industry journal.

Yes, you can still publish a last-minute blog to share on social media, but think of the opportunities you may have missed by not planning ahead.

National Observances to Consider for your Business

Here I’ve identified the top 3-5 National Observances for you to consider integrating into your marketing plan each month. The ones I’ve identified here are important, though some are a bit random. Our complete list of National Observances includes events for any type of business or industry.

Please enter your name and email for access to our full list of National Observances for 2019.

Download 2019 National Observances

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January Observances:

January 1: New Years Day
January 5: National Keto Day
January 24: National Compliment Day
3rd week in January: National Mocktail Week
National Blood Donor Month

February Observances:

February 4: National Hemp Day
February 14: Valentine’s Day
February 22: National Margarita Day
American Heart Month
Black History Month

March Observances:

National Employee Appreciation Day – First Friday in March
March 14: National Pi Day
March 26: National Spinach Day
Endometriosis Awareness Week – (First full week – Monday through Sunday)
National Brain Injury Awareness Month
National Women’s History Month

April Observances:

April 1: April Fools Day
April 8: National Zoo Lovers Day
April 21: Easter
National Child Abuse Awareness Month
National Parkinson’s Awareness Month

May Observances:

May 12: Mother’s Day
May 18: National HIV Vaccine Awareness Day
May 27: Memorial Day
Small Business Week – First Week in May
Celiac Disease Awareness Month
Melanoma Awareness Month

June Observances:

June 1: National Go Barefoot Day
June 12: National Peanut Butter Cookie Day
June 16: Father’s Day
LGBTQIA Pride Month
Men’s Health Month

July Observances:

July 4: Independence Day
July 12: National Simplicity Day
July 31: National Avocado Day
National Grilling Month
National Ice Cream Month

August Observances:

August 1: Respect for Parents Day
August 3: International Beer Day
August 19: National Soft Ice Cream Day
Simplify Your Life Week – First Week
Family Fun Month

September Observances:

September 2: Labor Day
September 8: National Suicide Prevention Month
September 13: National Kids Take over the Kitchen Day
September 30: National Chewing Gum Day
National Chewing Gum Day
National Suicide Prevention Month

October Observances:

October 28: National Chocolate Day
October 31: Halloween
Adopt A Shelter Dog Month
Breast Cancer Awareness Month
National Chiropractic Month

November Observances:

November 11: Veterans Day
November 22: Thanksgiving
November 24: Small Business Saturday
November 26: Cyber Monday
Adopt A Senior Pet Month
Gluten-Free Diet Awareness Month
National Alzheimer’s Disease Month

December Observances:

December 2: Chanukah
December 4: National Cookie Day
December 21: Winter Solstice
December 25: Christmas
National Human Rights Month
National Tie Month

As you build out your Digital Marketing Plan, we recommend downloading our complete list of National Observances. Start by deleting any cells or events that don’t apply to your business. Be sure, however, to think outside of the box.

Could you celebrate National Chocolate Chip Cookie day with the office?

Does anyone on your team support organizations that rely on the exposure of these National Observances?

Once observances have been identified for your business to highlight in the Content Plan, be sure to assign the observance to an individual. Make sure they consider the goals of creating content for the observance, specific promotions related to the day, partners to approach for joint marketing efforts, etc.

Download 2019 National Observances

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And of course, if this has been helpful for you, or if you’ve considered outside the box ideas to incorporate National Observances into your content plan, leave a comment below!

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Is your Content Marketing Plan Failing your Business, Editorial Calendar 2019, #nationalholidays #businessevents2019

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Gabrielle Crumley - Rielle Social Media

In this interview with Gabrielle, she had her heart and mind set on one direction in college, and little did she know after taking one marketing class, how her world would change. Sometimes you have to just trust your gut and take the leap of faith. Gabrielle has created a life around something she has found a passion for, allowing her to create the freedom and flexibility she was looking for. While still having a passion for animals her path has taken her in a different direction. Listen and see how.

More about Rielle Social Media

Gabrielle Crumley is the social media expert and digital marketing strategist behind Rielle Social Media.

I am passionate about helping business owners overcome their branding and social media challenges to see real success online.

Do you stress about what to post, or spending way too much money on ads that don’t convert? Whatever your specific business goals may be, I can help you achieve them. Learn more about her and her services at https://www.riellesocialmedia.com/

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