,

Social Media Tips for the Holiday Season

Social Media Tips For The Holiday Season

As the holiday season sneak up and the end of the year approaches once again, most business owners are thinking of ways to connect with their audience while looking for one last push to finish the year strong.

Every business owner I know has more on their plate than usual at this time of the year. They’re focused on mapping out their holiday social media strategy and pushing out online deals that would capture their audience’s attention. After all, consumers are already at their computers, with their credit cards on standby. You don’t want to get left behind.

Use these tips to get ahead of the marketing game and stand out from the competition.

Create holiday-themed content

Did you know that 64% of consumers turn to social media platforms when looking for gift ideas for their friends and loved ones? If you haven’t already, take this opportunity to share deals and special offers on your social media pages.

Of course, you shouldn’t just focus on deals. You want to offer valuable content to your fans and followers.

Take time to fill your social media calendar with holiday-themed content. Depending on what niche you’re in, you can create some gift guides, share holiday recipes, or even share some safety tips.

Host a holiday giveaway

With the competition getting tougher every year, businesses are looking for a way to stand out. Now, the only thing that’s better than a good deal is something you can get for free. Hosting a holiday giveaway gives your audience a chance to get a free give for themselves or their loved ones.

The key to a successful giveaway is high demand. That said, you need to provide a compelling incentive — something your audience wants. For best results, you can involve your audience in the planning process. Conduct a survey and ask them what they’d like you to giveaway.

But before you start planning what to give away and what the guidelines are, it is important to determine your goal. Are you looking for ways to grow your email list? Or are you hoping to get your followers involved with your brand?

Get your ads ready to go

The holiday season is a busy time for business owners. People are already in buying mode as they’re looking for the perfect gift for their loved ones. If you want to generate more sales, you’d like to get your products in front of your audience. And running ads is one of the best ways to do so.

But here’s the thing… Ad costs usually go up this time of year since there is more competition. That means you’d have to pay a bit more than you would on a regular day.

To make the most of your ad budget, we suggest that you focus on warm audiences- those already familiar with your brand. Customers with pre-existing brand affinity are easier to convert than new, unproven audiences.

Create genuine holiday messages

2021 is nearing its end. This is the perfect opportunity for you to connect with your clients and customers in an authentic, non-salesy way. Not only will it help you build a relationship with them, but it’s also a good way to cut through the noise.

Remember that most users receive dozens of “Happy Holidays” emails from brands during the holiday season, so make sure yours stand out. So if you decide to send holiday greetings via email, we suggest that you create a powerful, personal message that honestly speaks to your audience.

A video message would be a great option if you want to increase your engagement while showing your customers how much you appreciate their support. Why? Because studies suggest that 72% of consumers prefer watching videos from businesses over other types of marketing.

Practice the art of storytelling

It’s the season of joy, giving, and gratefulness once again. Use this time to share a heartwarming story with your fans and followers and practice the art of storytelling.

With more vying for the attention of online shoppers, it becomes even more challenging to cut through the noise. A nice, touching story will capture your audience’s attention and get the readers into the holiday spirit.

There are a lot of ways to tell a story. You can write a blog, conduct an interview, or create a short video. The key is to focus on brand cohesion and a story that your audience can resonate with.

Final thoughts

The holidays is a time of joy and togetherness for many of us. But for businesses, both big and small, it’s also the biggest period for online sales. All of a sudden, you’re met with a flurry of holiday advertisements and tempting shopping deals.

If you need help capturing the festive season in your social media posts and looking to separate your brand from the competition, we encourage you to book a free 30-minute call with us. We’ll help you build your social strategy and prepare for a more profitable 2022.

Social Media Tips For The Holiday Season

Holiday Social Media Tips For Your Ecommerce BusinessHoliday Social Media Tips For Your Nutrition Practice

Holiday Social Media Tips For Your Acupuncture Practice

/by
, ,

Holiday Marketing Tips to Boost Ecommerce Sales

Holiday Marketing Tips to Boost Ecommerce Sales

Holidays are undoubtedly the best time of the year to rake in the best profits. It’s that one season when consumers not only shop for themselves but for everyone else who matters to them.

People who usually don’t visit your site may suddenly be on the lookout for a gift for themselves or their family and friends. Either way, they are consumers. The only possible problem is that every brand is vying for their attention.

So how can you ensure that your e-commerce store stands out? Use these tips to boost your sales this holiday season.

Offer bundles

Every business owner shares a common goal: to generate more sales. Product bundling is a win-win for both sellers and buyers. You get to sell more products. Buyers, on the other hand, get a discount for buying multiple products. Plus, they get to save money on shipping.

This was a marketing strategy that Nintendo used years ago. They bundled their gaming consoles and video games, and the sales went up by 100,000.

The key is to find the right mix of your products for your bundled package. If you’re selling cosmetics, you can create a bundle that includes lipstick and a lip liner. They’re complementary products and would make sense for consumers to buy them as a bundle.

Highlight bestsellers  

For most e-commerce stores, their best-selling items make up 80% of their sales. These are proven products your customers love. If you’re targeting a cold audience, you want to be sure you’re putting your best foot forward.

Showcasing your bestsellers and recommendations on your platform will make it easily accessible for your shoppers. It can hasten their decision-making process. You’ll be doing them a favor by guiding them on what’s best in-store.

Create gift guides

People turn to Google for gift ideas for their loved ones. By creating gift guides, you’re not just doing your audience a favor; you’re also attracting more customers and improving your search engine rankings.

Of course, you’d want to include your products on the list. Be sure to highlight the features and benefits of each product to show people why it would make a great gift.

The more specific the gift guide, the more likely will it capture people’s attention. Consider the demographic of your audience when writing gift guides. Think about their age, gender, hobbies, interests, etc.

Maximize email marketing

With an average of 24% Click Through Rate and a 6% Conversion Rate, email remains to be the most cost-effective way to speak to your buyers at a personal level. This is where you build relationships with them way before the holidays.

To make the most out of the holiday season, you need to plan ahead. Send out teasers to build excitement for your upcoming sales. So when the day comes, your subscribers will be ready to click the “buy now” button.

Make sure that you personalize your email campaigns. There’s a good chance your competitors are also sending out emails. The last thing you want is for your emails to be lost in an inbox full of similar offers.

Redesign with a festive theme

Want to capture the attention of your potential buyers? Ensure that your E-commerce site, particularly your landing page, is in line with the festive theme of the season.

Choose a theme that resonates with the mood and the spirit of your target market. Changing colors, adding graphics, adding a dedicated category for the holidays would call better attention to your online store.

Make mobile shopping easy

It’s no surprise that the global population is attached to their mobile phones. Make sure that your mobile site is easy to navigate and that checkout is a breeze.

The more user-friendly your mobile site is, the more likely shoppers would do business with you. Support thematic searches (i.e., gifts for men, gifts for her) and give leeway for misspelling for an easier search. According to research, 25% of shoppers leave their cart because navigation and checkout are too complicated. Be mindful not to do that.

Offer limited-time discounts

To encourage buyers to complete their shopping, highlight any discounts on their existing items in the cart. A scarce offer for a limited time frame may also induce a sense of urgency to complete the process. Remember that competition is tough out there. The better your offer is compared to others, the more likely that consumers will stick with you.

Automate as much as you can

Incorrect orders and delivery delays are two of the many things that can completely turn away a customer for good. With the influx of orders during the holidays, automate as much as possible to reduce errors and mistakes.

Final thoughts 

The holiday season is one of the busiest times of the year for both retail and e-commerce business owners. But let’s face it. Increasing sales isn’t something you can achieve overnight. It requires careful planning and a robust marketing strategy.

If you need help with your holiday marketing campaign, please feel free to reach out to us. Schedule a free 30-minute call with us, and we’ll help you create a marketing strategy that will boost your conversion rates not just on the festive days but the whole year-round.

Holiday Marketing Tips to Boost Ecommerce Sales

Holiday Marketing Tips to Boost Ecommerce SalesHoliday Marketing Tips to Boost Ecommerce Sales

 

/by
,

5 Benefits to Running Remarketing Ads on Facebook

Benefits to Retargeting ads

Today’s blog discusses remarketing ads or retargeting ads. Specifically, we’re going to be focusing on Facebook, however, this also applies to Google or any other ad network that you’re on, as long as you have that tracking code on your website, that then tracks what people have been doing with either the ads, or with your website once they get there.

First of all, why should you have retargeting ads for your marketing?

There are five main reasons that I think of when it comes to remarketing ads. These include:

  1. Brand Awareness
  2. Create more qualified leads
  3. Show Your Audience Compelling Content that Aligns with Their Interests
  4. Automate and Streamline Upsells and Sales
  5. Increase ROI with Retargeting Ads

 

Listen to the Digital Marketing Podcast

Read the Transcript

Hi there, Caitlin McDonald here with the Social Speak Network, and today we’re going to be talking about remarketing ads, or retargeting ads. Specifically, we’re going to be focusing on Facebook, however, this also applies to Google or any other ad network that you’re on, as long as you have that tracking code on your website, that then tracks what people have been doing with either the ads, or with your website once they get there.

First of all, why should you have retargeting ads for your marketing?

There are five main reasons that I think of when it comes to remarketing ads.

Raise Brand Awareness

The first is to raise brand awareness. It often takes people between seven and 12 touches in order to make that purchasing decision with your company, and so by having retargeting ads you are really building that brand awareness. The second reason is to increase the marketing efforts from your other platforms. So let’s say you have an email campaign, or you’re working with another company that drives a lot of traffic to the site, you’re paying money to get people there the first time, you might as well make sure that they are then converting into clients of yours, or customers of yours. So remarketing really helps to make sure that people who are being driven to the site through other efforts, then are growing with that brand awareness and learning to know, like, and trust your business.

Create more qualified leads

Next, it helps you create more qualified leads. And the reason why this is, is because you can actually utilise retargeting ads to track somebody and to drive somebody through your sales funnel. So what we sometimes do, is we’ll show ads to somebody who’s been to a landing page, but not a thank you page, or we’ll show ads to somebody who has been to a thank you page, or looking very high top of the funnel, maybe somebody has just been to the home page of your website, but never drilled down to specific content. Having the retargeting ads really helps to drive more qualified leads, because we are progressively getting somebody to interact more and more with your content, with your website, with your services, so that when you actually get on the phone with them, or they actually get to the sales page, they’re ready to say, “Sign me up now.”

Show Your Audience Compelling Content that Aligns with Their Interests

Next, number four. Is that through using retargeting, you can actually show people more compelling content. If you know what pages of the website, or what products, or services, people have viewed you can actually create a whole campaign to show them more similar content, or similar products, related products, or even the same product, over and over again through different media and through different links, so that you really are showing them that you understand what they are looking for and interested in. If we’re talking about a website let’s say, that has both books and products on it, and somebody keeps on going to the book section of the website, they’re probably not as interested in the product services of the website, so you want to make sure that they’re seeing more and more information about potential books that they could be interested in. If you notice that somebody never goes to the book section of the website and only looks at the products, then they probably are going to be more interested in there.

You can also think about the same way with videos. Let’s say somebody watches part of a video, Facebook allows you to target people who have only watched three seconds let’s say of a video. You can show them content that’s related to that first three seconds of the video, and show somebody who’s watched more of the video more advanced content, so that you are really helping them move through that sales funnel, without them having to remember to come back and go to your website, or check you out.

Automate and Streamline Upsells and Sales

Now, the fifth reason is to help automate and streamline some of the upsells and sales moving forward after somebody has purchased that initial product. So if you know somebody has gotten to the thank you page after checking out, then you can show them more advanced products, or related products and services that are going to help them even more with whatever journey they’re on with your business. And so this is a great way to help get repeat customers, or help them share your offer with other people. Imagine having a Refer a Friend ad pop-up after you’ve made a purchase for a website, this would be a great way, an easy touch, to get them to interact with your business more and to engage their family and friends with your business as well. And so we highly recommend creating multiple different types of retargeting campaigns on Facebook and testing out linking to things like blog posts, product pages, posting videos, boosting posts, and diving in deeper with webinars or more advanced pieces of training.

So by doing this, again, really you’re working to build that brand awareness, working to drive people down through that sales cycle at lower cost than just showing somebody one ad and forgetting about them, and also making sure that people don’t get bored seeing the same thing over and over again. You want to make sure that you’re showing them related content that is very interesting to them, but not the same offer over and over again, especially if they’ve already clicked to learn more and decided not to move forward.

I hope that this has been helpful, about the reasons why you should make sure to include remarketing or retargeting in your ads on Facebook. It is pretty easy to set this up. You need to make sure that you have the Pixel installed on every page of your website, and that you’ve created audiences for either specific pages on your website, or categories of blog posts, or things like thank you pages, or landing pages about specific topics. You can group these together in different audiences and then just select that audience as you are creating the ad campaign. Additionally, if you have an email list, let’s say one of the things that you’re working on is growing an email list, you can then re-target to these individuals, or create a lookalike audience to continue growing your email list at a lower cost. We’ve done this for a few clients where their big goal is growing that email list with qualified candidates. And so we take the list that’s already built of qualified candidates, we load it as an audience and then we create a look-alike audience, so that we’re sure we’re targeting similar people to the folks who have already pushed forward and moved forward. And so this is a great way, again, using remarketing and re-targeting tools, to drive the cost of your marketing down.

Increase ROI with Retargeting Ads

If you can squeeze a few more conversions out of each person who sees the ad, or each campaign, excuse me, then it’s definitely well worth your effort to spend the time to create the remarketing campaigns. Of course, pay attention to what website, or what pages people are going to on your site, how they’re interacting with the content, and from there you’ll be able to drive your business forward with Facebook ads.

Now, if you have any questions about how to run these ads on Facebook, or get your account all set up, we’d love to have a conversation with you. Head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com, click that Free Consultation link and we can hop on a 30-minute phone call just to get acquainted. If this has been beneficial for you, click that Subscribe button and of course follow us for more information. Thanks so much and I’ll see you next time.

/by

Website Maintenance and Malware for 2021

wordpress website malware

Today we are going to be talking about website security. This includes how to keep your website up-to-date, as well as what to do if you do find that you have malware on your website. We are specifically talking about WordPress websites here, and I will be sharing my screen, so if you are listening to our podcast, please head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and check out the related blog post or over to YouTube just to watch the video. The first thing that we are going to be talking about is backups and tools to utilize for backing up and why it’s important. Then we are jumping into updating your WordPress files, removing unused themes and plugins, adding a layer of security, and finally, if you’ve been hacked, what to do.

Use GoDaddy Pro, FileZilla, or Your Hosting for WordPress Backups

The first piece of this is, whenever you are talking about updating a WordPress website, you should make sure that you have backups of some sort enabled. So this could be manually going into your hosting account, downloading a copy of the database, as well as taking a copy of everything from the file manager and storing that on your computer, or you could utilize a plugin such as BackupBuddy to take a backup, or you could signup for a backup plan through your hosting account. And this might be included in your hosting, a lot of times hosting providers have backups actually included within their hosting plans, or you can do what we do for all of our websites that we manage, where we have another layer of protection through GoDaddy Pro.

This is a tool that is through GoDaddy, and I know a lot of you listeners and a lot of our clients have chosen not to work with GoDaddy for a variety of issues. There are plenty of other hosting companies out there, and we thoroughly enjoy working with a lot of them. This tool, however, is a free tool and it allows us to easily see all of the websites that we manage in one central location and see which plugins need to be updated, themes that need to be updated, and to do the backups directly through there. So we are going to be talking about GoDaddy Pro a lot. So, let me actually just jump in and I’m going to share my screen.

GoDaddy Pro Dashboard

Here we have the GoDaddy Pro dashboard for our website, for Social Speak, and I do feel kinda bad because I did have 11 updates for our plugins and one theme that I needed to update on our website, but I already recorded this video and realized I did not have any sound turned on. [chuckle] So you’re not going to be able to see me actually update our website here, but that’s okay. We all make mistakes, right? At least it’s all up-to-date now. But directly within the GoDaddy Pro dashboard, there is this backup link here, so if you were looking to update your website head on over to GoDaddy Pro and link it up to your website, your WordPress website. Now, if you do have a GoDaddy account for your hosting, you can do daily backups for free. If you do not, then you can do monthly backups for free and then upgrade if you do need to clone your website or restore a backup or download the backup or anything like that. But typically for a small website that isn’t really being updated frequently, a monthly backup is fine, and updating the plugins and theme files monthly is fine.

Daily and Monthly Backups for WordPress

Here though, I did just want to show you that we have the option for daily backups. We have some clients who are posting multiple blog posts, or updating multiple pages, adding new resources every single day, and so for them, it’s really important to have this daily backup. For those websites, we also do recommend having a backup plan in place directly through your hosting account as well, and that’s just because sometimes if the website has completely broken, it’s easier to update directly from the source rather than from a third party tool. Those plans though, can cost, I don’t know, $5 to $15 to $25 really, depending on what service and what hosting company you are working with.

The first step, again, of making sure that your website is secure and up-to-date is adding these backups. The next step is making sure that all of your WordPress files and theme files are up-to-date. The issue here is that if something hasn’t been updated recently, it opens the doors for hackers to go in and install malware. You want to make sure you have the most up-to-date PHP, and that also causes old themes and old plugins that haven’t been updated not to be compatible anymore. So this can be bad for a lot of different things, including for search engine optimization, and user experience on your website, something might just break. So you want to make sure everything is up-to-date.

I’m going to quickly jump to another website here. This is just another website that we have here, and as you can see, there are two plugins, one theme, and then the WordPress that all need to be updated. So, I’m going to just do a safe update, takes a backup, does the update and then turn, does another snapshot, another backup with the most up-to-date files that are there. So this is kind of that easy way of doing that.

Keep WordPress Plugins and Theme Files Up To Date

Now, when I did that, you noticed that there was just one, two, two different plugins that needed to be updated. Now, if a plugin is really old or a theme is really old, it might not be supported anymore and the theme developers or plugin developers might not be updating it anymore. So a plugin that we recommend in selling on your website is this plugin condition. And so, what this will do, and I’ll zoom in on the screenshot here, is it will actually have a notice for the last time something was updated. And so, this one here, this numbers plugin, for example, was updated a year ago. So most likely this might not be as compatible with WordPress as a newer version of some sort of user enrollment management plugin. This might be a plugin that they are not keeping up with anymore.

Additionally, in this screenshot right here, you see that this plugin is not even being used. It’s not active on the website. So, as you’re going through your plugins and your themes and updating them, take note if there are any that you’re not actively using. So here, I would actually recommend selecting all of these plugins that are deactivated and deleting them. These are very clearly plugins that you are not utilizing on your website, you do not need that functionality, so get rid of them. Make sure that the website files remain clean and concise so that it removes any opportunity for the hackers to get in and for malware to get on your site.

The same thing goes with themes as well. So here, let’s see if I can jump over here, I probably can. So here we only have the Enfold Theme on this website, however, when you are installing a WordPress website, oftentimes it also installs the 2020 theme, the 2019 theme, the 2016 theme, and WordPress will install a lot of themes on that initial installation. You want to make sure that you delete all of those extra themes. So in GoDaddy Pro, again, you don’t need FTP access or anything like that, you can just go to themes, you select the theme, and then you delete it. This will keep those theme files nice and clean and remove more of a chance of malware being able to get on to your site.

Remove Unused and Risky Plugins

A lot of times we see a plugin like this one, file manager plugin. Basically, this creates an FTP connection directly through your WordPress dashboard. And so, it allows any administrative user who has access to your WordPress dashboard to have access to the actual file manager on your website. And we’ve seen that this plugin in particular, but other plugins like it, have opened the doors for hackers and for malware to be installed on your website. So we highly, highly, highly recommend that you remove this sort of plugin from your website. So, I mean, even just looking at the reviews of it, hacked, hacked, hacked, hacked. Highly unsafe, avoid malware.

Consider a Security Package from Your Hosting Company

We actually had this problem with this plugin in particular before as well. Would be a great thing to do if you’re just building the website, but remove it immediately if you can. So if you are looking to add a layer of security and protection onto your website, we recommend registering for a website security package through your hosting account, and again, depending on what hosting plan you have, this might already be included, but GoDaddy, for example, has one where it includes a firewall, so any site visitor has to go through the firewall and then they can view the site. And so, this just allows it to make sure that no files are being adjusted by folks who shouldn’t have access to the website in the first place.

If your site has been hacked, they also have this great plan… Well, I guess all of these plans do this, but the security plan, this Express plan, basically puts your site at the top of the line to have an engineer go file by file and remove all of the malware and then keep you up-to-date on the progress. If you’re just kind of worried about it and you don’t really know that you have malware on the site, the deluxe version is a great choice, and this is kind of a reactive sort of plan. The Express plan is more of a proactive plan, where it has all the bells and whistles, and again, puts you at the top of the list.

Monitor Website for Malware with Google Search Console

You can also monitor your site through the Search Console, as well as through, on pro sites, there’s the security plan as well. And so, whenever you want to add a new thing to the site, a screen like that will come up and a monthly check is free, and then if you want to do the premium one, it costs less than a dollar a month. So, very, very worthwhile. Some hosting plans, this website, I believe, is hosted on Bluehost, but some hosting plans, such as all the ones on GoDaddy, the security check is free. So you don’t actually have to even pay for the essential plan per month, you can just add to GoDaddy Pro and activate it for free.

One thing that we have found, however, is that malware is getting more and more advanced, so you’re not necessarily going to be able to even tell that you have malware through these scans. The scans might show everything correct, but if you click a link from Facebook on a mobile phone and it’s your first time visiting the site in a month, you might be redirected to another site, for example. Or if you click from Chrome versus Safari, versus Firefox, you might experience the malware. So it’s important just to make sure that everything is staying up-to-date and as secure as possible so that there’s less of a chance of even having to deal with malware, to begin with.

This time of year is a great time to really make sure that your site is protected and as up-to-date as possible as you’re moving into 2021. We do, however, recommend for next year, going into your website at least monthly and making sure all the plugins and theme files and WordPress files are up-to-date. Again, you can utilize GoDaddy Pro as an option, as a tool, to make sure that you also have the backups running and the security monitoring going on, but you can do it manually as well.

Contact Our Team For WordPress Website Help

If you have questions about how to do website maintenance, please don’t hesitate to reach out, or if you’re looking for support and someone to help with this website maintenance, we are here for you. We have very affordable plans for website maintenance to help you keep your site up-to-date and clean, as well as working its best so that you’re putting your best foot forward. Please head on over to the socialspeaknetwork.com, click that free consultation button and we’ll schedule a 30-minute call just to get to know you and your needs, and then we can figure out if we are a good fit for you. Of course, if this has been helpful, we’d love for you to subscribe down below and follow us on iTunes, as well as YouTube and check out our blog. Alright, thank you so much and I’ll see you next time.

 

Website Maintenance and Malware for 2021

Website Maintenance and Malware for Your Nutrition Practice for 2021Website Maintenance and Malware for Your Yoga Practice for 2021

Website Maintenance and Malware for Your Acupuncture Practice for 2021

/by

Enfold Heading and Menu Settings – Center Logo on Menu

enfold theme menu customizations

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

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

Sets and CSS to add from Enfold Tutorials is at:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#top nav .social_bookmarks { float: right; }

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

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

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

/by
,

Why Digital Marketing is Essential for Healthcare

Why Digital Marketing is Essential for Healthcare

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

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

1.    In-depth patient analytics

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

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

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

2.    Catering to online health care requirements

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

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

3.    Working on specific health sectors through digital promotion

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

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

4.    Reach patients on a global scale

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

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

5.    The best way to gather patient requirements quickly

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

Conclusion

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

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

 

/by
,

Ty Allen SocialClimb Interview

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

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

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

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

In this interview we discuss:

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

 Listen to the Medical Marketing Podcast:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

What Directories Should a Medical Practice Use?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

Physician Google My Business Listings

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

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

 

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

How to Solicit Reviews from Patients

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ty Allen: Great, thank you.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Wonderful thank you so much!

 

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

 

 

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

/by
,

Website Development For Medical Clinics

Website Development For Medical Clinics

On today’s episode of The Social Speak podcast, we’re going to be talking a little bit about website development and specifically our process for website development for your healthcare clinic.

We specialize in creating websites that capture your brand, your voice, your expertise and best position yourself in your medical practice to be found by prospects. Now, when we build a website, we don’t view it as a one-and-done sort of thing. It’s not a brochure that you print out and then you have thousands of copies to hand out.

Healthcare Website Design and Development

A website is an ever growing and changing, and shifting presence online, where we recommend you are continually adding blogposts, uploading videos, creating resources and interviews to engage your prospects and engage your current patients.

So the reason why I want to do this today, is we just finished up a website for one of our clients and our main contact, the office manager sent over such a fabulous note. She writes, “I am beyond thrilled with how everything has turned out so far, and want to thank you so much for all of the hard work. Prior to starting this project, I heard horror stories from some friends and colleagues who have been in charge of website redesigns and had been dreading the process. You and your team made it so easy on us and we could not be happier with the way things have gone. We really look forward to our continued partnership moving forward.”

So this is just one of the many testimonials that we have from a local clinic who had an old website that frankly, they just weren’t thrilled about. The pages were hard to update, they did not include current information, and it was hard to really adjust the functionality, so that it attracted the right people to their organization.

Listen to the Podcast

 

How we create websites for clients

Now, the process that we follow for creating websites for our clients tries to make it as fun and simple as possible. I got a kick out of designing these websites because really I’m able to visualize what that end goal is.

Analyze your current website

Oftentimes, you start with the website and potentially you just can’t stand the look and feel of it. However if we go into the backend and we look and we see that everything really is set up very strongly for Google and you are getting patients and prospects from the website, we might actually tell you, “You know what, there are better ways to spend your budget rather than doing the website redesign.”

Now, if we look in the back end and things are just as messy as they are on the front end, we’ll let you know and we will help you work through a process that we follow for creating the new websites.

Initial conversation

So the first thing that we do is we have an initial conversation, they’ll be with myself, potentially, my business partner will be on the call as well or one of our account managers, and we ask questions,

  • Do you currently have a website, what are websites you like the look and feel of and what are some that you don’t?

This allows us to see if there are similarities between the ones that you like and the ones that you don’t like so that we can replicate by using your own branding and values and purpose and goals, though with items that you do like compared to the ones that you don’t.

  • What are the top concerns about your current website, what are the top goals for your new website?
  • How will you measure if the site is performing, what is the main call to action?

So new consultations booked, appointments scheduled, email sign ups, increased traffic, things like that, so we can track all of that as well as where they’re coming from.

  • Additional functionality that you’d like to see in your new website

Let us know if there are functionalities you’d like to expand on and carry on from your old website.

  • Questions about your current brand standards

Oftentimes, our clients already do have their branding all set and solidified. They have their logos, their fonts, their colors. However, if you are a newer healthcare clinic or want to go through a complete rebranding of your healthcare clinic, we can definitely help with that as well.

We have a few partners that depending on your niche will make a great fit for that branding side. However, a lot of times our clients come to us, their website is just not performing as it should, they’re all set with their branding, all set with their value selection, things like that and we just take that and move it into the 21st century.

  • What is your target market?

So in order to create a website that attracts this target, we need to understand:

  1. Who they are –  so we wanna know who your ideal patient is and understand some of those success stories.
  2. What were they struggling with beforehand and where did they come out the other side, once they were done working with your physicians, your doctors?
  3. What about you, what about your brand?– We wanna know the values and the passions of the doctors, as well as the admin, the administration, so that we can really understand how to capture your unique voice through the website.

We have some websites that we work through where we are rewriting all of the copy on the website, and running it through your medical director to make sure it’s all approved, and then we have other clients who write the content, or already have the content written and they just wanna make sure that it’s displayed the best on a new website.

We find that branding and layout and content really have to all work together in order to have a seamless website. It can’t just have images, and then content built separately. You need to pull them together. We also love to talk about the benefits of working with you. So what are some of those most impactful transformations that your clients realize with working with you?

Plan website’s structure

So once we have all of this information and we have our website kick-off call, we get to work. And the first thing that our team does and I am actually going to hold up a workbook, right here.

So, if you’re listening to the podcast, you can kind of visualize this basically, it’s just very rough sketches of what pages could look like. And this one right here, it has a header. It has icons, events, kinda scrolling testimonials. And so what we do is we take elements that we see on other websites that you have noted that you like the look and feel of, and we see how we can then incorporate similar items into your website.

We typically have a page layout for the home page, then another page layout for the top level services pages, so let’s say you have one service page for all of the different… Oh goodness, thinking of too many different industries [chuckle] for all of the different dental care options that you have. So that page would have one layout, however all of the sub-pages, that go into dental cleaning surgeries, cavity extractions, and things like that, would have a different layout. So those are three layouts there, a layout for your contact page and probably a layout for your about page. And so each of these pages, they’re going to have a similar look and feel, however we’ve found by differentiating them by layout a little bit helps to make sure that somebody can move smoothly through the website.

As we’re building the site, we also make sure that we really understand your page hierarchy. So, this means how do all of your pages and services relate to one another? How should Google be ranking them and how can we link between the pages to get that best search engine optimization for you?

Search Engine Optimization

While we’re doing that and putting the content on the pages, we’re doing keyword research. Potentially the wording and the language that you use within your practice isn’t what people are actually looking for on Google.

So we wanna make sure that we are writing for search engines, writing to showcase your expertise and then also writing to best position your practice to be the one that clients and prospects then choose to become a patient.

Web design and content approval

Now this whole process, we like to move through it actually fairly quickly, at least that design element. We recognize that it does take time for content to be approved, messaging to be approved. However, our process is typically a one-month turnaround, for smaller website projects.

Turnaround time

Within the first two weeks, we wanna get you a working design, a working layout that you can poke around and see where we’re going for that look and feel. Typically, at this point, we’ll have that home page, about page, main services page, sub-services page and contact page. If I haven’t said that, contact page, all kind of set, ready to go.

Then, if you already have the content and you have minimal additional functionality, maybe a blog on potentially lead capture form and we utilize Influx MD for most of our healthcare clinic websites. If you need that, again, typically a month, we can get most of the site all set ready to go and then just that approval process might take another month.

So we like to have a website started and completed within that same quarter. If you want additional functionality, such as payment center, maybe a more robust directory listing for your physicians, scheduling tools and things like that, might take a little bit longer.

Integrating Influx MD

If we are integrating Influx MD in there, they do have an onboarding process as well to make sure that we are tapping into the systems and processes that you already have and really bringing those to help your administration through the whole process of that initial scheduling.

Influx MD is a HIPAA compliant form system so that it really taps into your current processes, keeps everything secure and allows us to then, moving forward after the website’s done, move into lead collection for your healthcare clinic. And that’s where our ongoing marketing really ties in with search engine optimization as well as running sponsored advertising, writing blog posts, doing doctor interviews and posting to social media, all of which tie into how people that interact and utilize your website to achieve their goals.

Conclusion

So if you have any questions about how your website currently is working, I’d love to do an audit on your website, so we can talk about what your goals are and see if it’s actually accomplishing them. Or a small tweak might be able to better align your website with what you’re hoping to do.

If we find in that process that a new website is going to be the best course of action, I’ll send over that website onboarding form and we’ll schedule a call from there to really dive into what those goals are and that look and feel that you’re going for that website. So I can’t wait to talk with you about your medical marketing website, and I hope that this has been insightful about some of what that process looks like for working with our team.

If you like this episode, and you want to learn more about healthcare marketing, please subscribe to our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel and jump on over to our website to check out the additional blog posts that we have over there.

Website Development For Medical Clinics

 

Website Development For Medical Clinics

Website Development For Medical Clinics

/by
, ,

Medical Marketing Strategy in 2020

Increase patients wiht digital marketing strategy

In this podcast we review the exact strategy Social Speak uses with their healthcare practices to boost new consultations and build brand loyalty online.

Please view the video at Youtube if you would like to see the screen share – click here to access.

The Social Speak Digital Strategy for Medical Marketing (our Roadmap to Digital Marketing) includes:

  • Social Media
  • Blogging
  • SEO and Physician Interviews
  • Landing Page
  • Automated Email Follow-Up

The tools discussed in the podcast include:

If you are looking to increase the ROI from your digital marketing in 2020, please reach out to schedule a consultation today! We can’t wait to learn more about your practice.

Listen to the Podcast

Watch the Video

Read the medical marketing transcript

00:01 Caitlin McDonald: Hello and welcome to the Social Speak Network podcast. My name is Caitlin McDonald and I am one of the co-owners over here at Social Speak. So today, we were gonna wrap up the year talking about SEO as we’re moving into 2020. But I’m kind of pulling an audible and I really want to take the time to share the exact strategy that is working right now for our healthcare clinics. Now, this strategy is one that we’ve been utilizing for quite a while. However, it’s really working right now, so I want to make sure that moving into 2020, you’ll be able to implement this for your healthcare practice. Now, we also are available to help out as well. This is our specialty, managing the marketing campaigns for clinics and hospitals across the country. So if you do wanna schedule a free consultation, we’d love to chat with you, see if we’re a good fit, and I give you a couple of tips and pointers to get you moving in the right direction.

 

01:08 CM: So this strategy really utilizes a lot of different marketing techniques, but it is pretty straight forward. So I’m gonna be… If you’re on our podcast, I’ll be talking through everything. If you jump over to our YouTube channel, you’ll be able to follow along and I’ll be able to show you some of the tools that we do utilize for our clinics and if you prefer reading, the transcript will be on our blog probably next week.

 

01:42 CM: So let’s get started. Let me share my screen here. And as I mentioned, the first part of our process really begins with the strategy. So when we’re taking a look at the strategy, we want to focus on a few different things. First and foremost, we do still utilize social media marketing. Social media is there to expand your reach and spread your authentic brand voice online. If you’re targeting younger individuals, older individuals, it really doesn’t matter, you need to prove that you are active online and a legitimate business. One of the ways to do this is by posting to social media accounts.

 

02:28 CM: So doing this builds brand loyalty by staying true to your values. It also helps you stay top of mind. Yes, your posts won’t necessarily reach everybody who’s following you online. In fact, it’ll probably only reach a couple of people, so we utilize ads to help with this as well. However, if somebody is actively looking for you, most likely your Facebook page will show up high in the search results so you wanna make sure that you are active there. And then, Facebook and social media also help you cultivate relationships and attract clients.

 

03:03 CM: The second piece of the strategy that we follow is blogging and SEO. Creating content, any content isn’t gonna work anymore, it’s creating the right content at the right time for your target market. So what does this actually mean for you? It means creating timely information so that you are found online, and it helps to build trust with your audience. For a couple of practices, what we are doing is doing physician interviews or interviews with your staff and transcribing those in a Q/A format, so that you are answering the questions that people are actually looking for online in a way that’s easy to digest and where they can really start building trust with the physicians in your practice.

 

03:55 CM: And then the last way is through lead generation. So with lead generation, really, our goal is to capture prospect information. Yes, you have to be aware of being HIPAA compliant, but we’ll dive into that. So here, you need a strategy to boost your new leads, to shorten the sales cycle, or that cycle for actually getting a prospect in the door, booking a consultation, and then also to increase your recurring revenue. So if you know somebody who typically comes in for one procedure, then ends up coming in for follow-up visits for something else, it might be good to focus on that first procedure and getting leads for that so that you can then share information through email marketing or in the office itself to get them booking those follow-up appointments as well.

 

04:52 CM: So this is where it gets really fun and it’s actually putting together that plan and diving in to do what you need to be doing for your marketing. So this is our roadmap to digital marketing and really goes through all of the different steps. Today, I’m gonna be focusing mostly on this lead generation piece. So, in lead generation, we’re really reaching people during their patient journey. So, as I mentioned, we’re figuring out what symptoms they have, what problems they’re experiencing and how they want to live their life differently if they come in and see you.

 

05:33 CM: So when we’re doing this, we’re utilizing Facebook ads for brand awareness and to get leads, Google AdWords for search targeting, and this is a great way to get people when they’re making that decision about who they’re gonna work with, and Facebook ads for re-targeting. So here, Facebook and Google really are the ad networks that we are utilizing for this. So I’m gonna jump on over here and I have up Google AdWords. Most of you probably already have an AdWords account. However, if you call… This is kind of a nice little tip, if you’re just getting started, tipping your toes in the water, you can actually call up this number here in the top of the page and a representative can help you set up your first campaign. If you don’t have someone on staff who knows how to set up AdWords, I do recommend utilizing Google’s own network of consultants who can set that up because it’s complementary. And again, a great way just to get started. Now, as you’re building more in-depth campaign, setting up conversion tracking and things like that, I do recommend working with an expert. Our team has a team of experts on staff who can help out with setting up campaigns, restructuring them from what Google originally sets up or what a previous agency has set up to make sure that they’re actually working for you.

 

07:08 CM: We oftentimes come into clinics and see that the geographic area isn’t quite right, or maybe a mixture of different services are piled into one ad group. All of these things can be detrimental for your practice. So an example of this, I just did a search for “pediatrician, Marlborough, Mass” and there are three that come up. But if you take a look, there’s no ads here. So if you are a pediatrician around there, it’s a great thing, [chuckle] a great opportunity for you. But what you’ll see is there are oftentimes fewer ads than there are doctors and other listings that come up. So that’s a great way to make sure as you are creating your campaign, that you’re showing up up here at the top. I don’t have Facebook up, but Facebook is very similar as well. Oftentimes, a health clinic will come on in… Or, excuse me, a marketing agency will come on in, they’ll set up a Facebook account and, or even someone on your staff. And one problem that we’ve seen is that oftentimes, these ads aren’t targeted for your audience correctly. So you want to make sure that you are being very specific in your targeting at least at the beginning, so that you can learn who’s responding to your messages and who isn’t.

 

08:42 CM: For Facebook, for example, let’s say you are working with individuals who have non-healing foot ulcers. Typically, this is caused by diabetes, so you can actually target people who have shown an interest in the National Diabetes Association, for example. They’re not gonna say on their profile that they have a foot ulcer, but they are going to be following, or most likely going to be following or have expressed interest in a national organization or a magazine, or another coach or something like that who has targeted them already. So this is a great way to kind of refine your messaging.

 

09:26 CM: Additionally, let’s say, your practice focuses on, I had pediatrics before, what you can do is you can target people, potentially, who just got married, or who have a toddler or have a… Or following other parenting pages. And this might be a great way to narrow down your target market there. Now, within those ads themselves, there are a few things that you need to really do in order to see a return on your investment. So one of the first things that we utilize is lead pages. Now, lead pages is not HIPAA compliant, however, you can embed a form on here that is HIPAA compliant so that the leads go into your system, the lead capture system, and the landing pages are just hosted on your website, built by lead pages.

 

10:30 CM: The reason why we do this is because we want them to be very specific and tailored towards that one service and towards that one target audience. So if you’re targeting a, I don’t know, a family member of somebody, who has somebody else in the family who’s suffering from addiction, you’re running ads to raise awareness about the support and resources that are out there, that landing page is gonna be different than what you want to appear or the language that you want to have that’s geared towards that person who’s suffering themselves. So here, lead pages is just the tool that we utilize. You can build a landing page just through WordPress, but we love lead pages because it is very easy to alter the page style, it allows you to do AB testing, so create two different versions of the same landing page, and have lead pages automatically show which one, whichever one, and then over time, you can tell which one is performing better. It also has great graphs. So typically for healthcare centers, we utilize conversion tracking a few different ways on lead pages itself. We want to optimize the number of people who are clicking on a link.

 

11:51 CM: Here’s a little example right here to schedule a consultation. That will then open up a pop-up, on that pop-up is the form that you create through that third party. So, on lead pages itself, we can’t tell how many people have then filled out the form, but that’s why we use the Facebook Pixel and Google Tag Manager. So here, lead pages, again, it’s just a great, easy way to set up those landing pages and test them. And have it be where it’s just a single page rather than going to… And I’ll just click on, I don’t know, one of these… So let’s say this is your website, this is the UMass Memorial Health Care Center. So if somebody goes to this page from an ad, there are so many other places to click. So we found that that is not good for increasing your ROI and conversion rates. So having a page that they go to where it’s just that single page with the call to action of scheduling a consultation, it works really well. Then there’s a question of what content should you utilize on that page and in the ads. So we actually have a form on our website, and I’ll put this in the description, socialspeaknetwork.com, work with us, onboarding lead generation.

 

13:27 CM: And this is geared towards kind of a broader audience than just healthcare centers. But you can fill it out and here you can select free consultation is what you’re trying to get. But then we have questions here that really will help you identify those key concerns, key questions, key fears of your patients, your target patients, and we have the questions so that they lead you through exactly sort of what you need in order to create the ad text as well as the text for the landing page. And so, we help you kind of really identify and nail down your target market and then create a story around it. So, in this story, we often do actually start with a sentence or two that’s somebody’s story. It could be your own story, a patient testimonial, or even just a made-up story that fits in with the benefits that you can provide for your clients, for your patients. From there, we go into the benefits of actually coming in to see your practice, and finally, the call to action to schedule a consultation. Creating a doctor video around this as well is also a great way to increase brand awareness.

 

14:56 CM: So again, work with us, onboarding lead generation, the link is down below. But you can just go through this exercise, and at the end, I believe that we do have, even go through an email sequence that you can utilize at the end, when you click submit, we will send you in an email those answers that you put in there so that you can then copy and paste or utilize them, you could also print out that form if you don’t wanna submit the information. However, we’re happy to chat with you about the process as well. So those story ads work really well on Facebook. And then, on Google, we’re utilizing headlines and short calls to action to contact you.

 

15:52 CM: Now, once somebody clicks on an ad, they go to lead pages, then what happens to them? If you don’t have to be HIPAA compliant, we recommend utilizing MailChimp. It’s very cost-effective, it’s a great way to get started, and it has wonderful bells and whistles that a lot of the big boys have. So it’s a great way to create those welcome series, as well as quick follow-up emails and everything.

 

16:22 CM: Now, if you are HIPAA complaint, we highly recommend utilizing Influx MD. It looks like not all the images have loaded on here, however, we have a great relationship with them. And so, a lot of our clients utilize us to help facilitate the creation of emails and everything, and basically, Influx MD takes somebody from being a prospect to scheduling their first consult. From there we’re really able to track the ROI. Influx MD is able to tell through our tracking where the patient or the prospect originally came from. It can automate and systematize the process of sending those initial questionnaires and forms that somebody needs to fill out. And then it can directly sync up with your patient management system. We really like it, just because it helps with the customer relationship as well as the lead management and then it has that sales and email marketing automation as well. So it really reduces the burden on your staff and helps prove how effective the marketing is. So, we utilize this a lot. We utilize Google analytics and we utilize Facebook Pixels as well, just to see where leads are coming from, see the cost per lead and everything like that. So, let me just jump back over here, see if there was anything else. Okay, and this is… It’s actually just a health coach, but it kind of shows you that process with the landing page, they click the button, here’s the form, and then they get a drip sequence of emails.

 

18:13 CM: So if you have been wondering if your marketing is working for your healthcare practice, maybe you didn’t quite have as good of a year in 2019 as you had projected and hoped. This process is really what we’re seeing to work right now. So we start with the Facebook just having information going out to your accounts to build trust in your brand, then we utilize blogging as one piece, and a physician interviews as another piece of your SEO strategy. What we’ve really been seeing work well for SEO is building back links. And so, submitting your website to different directories, different websites to have the link added to content. We have a whole team that’s working on that. It is a very manual process, but we have seen tremendous results there because you do wanna make sure your organic listing or your website is showing up organically as well as the ads and the map listing and everything. And another piece of that SEO is building reviews on Google and on Facebook, just so that you can have that social proof. So those reviews work really well to make sure that your map listing is showing up higher, as well as social proof.

 

19:42 CM: And then, it’s running the ads. So we run ads based on interest targeting on Facebook, keywords on Google, and then retargeting ads on both Facebook and Google, to make sure that if we’ve already paid for somebody to get to the site or landing page, we are recouping some of that cost by showing them repeat ads. Of course, we haven’t collected any information about them, it’s just based on the cookie on their website, that Facebook and Google are in charge of. [chuckle]

 

20:16 CM: From here, we utilize or we recommend utilizing a tool like Influx MD to make sure that you are remaining HIPAA compliant as you are emailing and creating relationships with these prospects who have become leads. And throughout this whole process make sure that you have the Google Webmaster tool… Excuse me, Google Tag Manager, so that you can track conversions, as well as clicks for phone numbers, or map clicks. And the Facebook Pixel installed on your site so that you can really track the ROI from Facebook ads.

 

20:53 CM: So I hope that this has been helpful leading through the actual techniques and strategies that we utilize for our clients. If you do want to schedule a consultation, we are more than happy to schedule a time for you. And we’d love to learn more about your practice, your target market and what you’re currently working on and struggling with right now. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you in the New Year on the Social Speak Network podcast

/by
, ,

Lead Generation for Medical Practices

Lead Generation for Health Care

Today we’re going to be talking about Lead generation. We’ve already discussed Facebook advertising and social media marketing and lead generation ties into this as well as your Patient Journey very closely.

Now as we dive into lead generation, there are some basic components that we are going to discuss. The first is having a clear understanding of what your ideal patient is looking for online, then it includes creating the messaging that’s going to bring this person into the door and get them interested in learning more, followed by the technical aspects of creating a landing page a welcome email and a thank you page. as we discussed these items were going to dive into the hero’s journey and what this means for creating advertising copy that captures the attention, build trust, and books initial consultations with your patients.

Often times we see health clinics run ads that direct people to a page on their website. While this is great for building website traffic we have found that these campaigns lead to nearly zero results and a negative return on investment for health care centers. While you want to make sure that you are helping those in your community, you also need to make sure that you are understanding how the money you spend in your advertising actually relates to an increase in revenue of your bottom line.

Please – if you know that your ads just run to a page on your website, jump into your account and pause them now and don’t hesitate to contact us for a marketing consultation.

Let’s start first with the needs of your ideal patient we’ve been talking about this over the past couple of months. You should already understand your patient Journey. What brings these patients in the door? What makes them look for your services? And how can you position the benefits of coming in to see your doctors so that it answers the key questions that you are prospects have.

Watch Lead Generation Strategy

Listen to the Lead Generation Strategy on our Marketing Podcast

Transcript of Healthcare Marketing Podcast on Medical Lead Generation

00:01 Caitlin McDonald: Hello and welcome to the Social Speak Network podcast. I’m Caitlin McDonald, the co-founder over here at Social Speak, and today we’re gonna be talking about lead generation for your healthcare practice. So, we’ve already discussed Facebook advertising and social media marketing, and lead generation really ties into these as well as your patient journey which we’ve been discussing all throughout very closely. So, as we dive into lead generation, there’s some basic components that we’re going to discuss. The first is having a clear understanding of what your ideal patient is looking for online. So, then, this dives into creating the messaging that’s going to bring this person into the door and get them interested in learning more. You follow this by the technical aspects of creating a landing page, and a welcome email, and a thank you page.

01:05 CM: And so, as we discuss these items, we’re going to dive into the hero’s journey, and what this means for creating advertising copy that captures the attention, builds trust, and books initial consultations with patients. So, oftentimes, we see healthcare clinics and different clinics run ads that direct people just to a page on their website, and maybe there’s a schedule, your appointment form there. Well, this is great for building traffic to your website, we’ve found that these campaigns really don’t lead to a return on your investment. Yes, you might get a few people booking appointments. However, there’s a much better way to run your lead generation campaigns, so that you have a higher chance of getting people filling out that initial form. And so we’ll be diving into that today.

02:02 CM: So, while you wanna make sure that you’re helping those in your community, you also need to make sure that the money that you’re spending on getting people through a funnel is actually increasing the revenue to your bottom line. So if you know that your ads run to a page of your website on your website, please jump into those accounts, pause them now, pick up your phone, give us call, we are here to help you. Again, this is the number one mistake that we see health care centers and clinics make. So, again, yes, it’s awesome that you’re getting website traffic there, but are they actually been converting into patients for your clinic?

02:51 CM: So, taking a step back, let’s first talk about the needs of your ideal patient. And we’ve been talking about this for the past month or so, maybe two months, and you should already have a sense of your patient journey. So this includes what brings the patients into the door, what makes them look for your services, and how can you position the benefits of coming in to see your doctors so that it answers the key questions, concerns, and fears that your prospects have? So take the time to review your patient journey again. And, again, this can be multiple patient journeys. I just want you to think about one of them. Once you have that patient journey at the forefront of your mind, you can begin to understand how you can position the answers to these common questions and solutions to these common fears as part of the hero’s journey framework.

03:51 CM: So let’s quickly talk about the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey originates from Joseph Campbell, and really can be a framework that we can utilize in our marketing messaging. I’m not gonna go through step-by-step about what Joseph Campbell says, but more about how we can use it in your marketing language. So we actually follow this process when we are writing Facebook ads for our healthcare centers. So, the step one, first step is create an emotion. And this is really getting people involved and getting them to have a connection to the story that you are telling. Then the next thing is to determine a theme. This is an idea of how we should live our lives. Are you finding peace in your life, or are you living a life of greater success? Are you living on your own terms, and things like that? Then you can talk about the hero’s journey. So, what was their life before they started on this journey? What was the background?

05:09 CM: Then, what did you long for, what did this person long for? So, for example, if it’s somebody who has knee pain, their life before is that they could hardly get off of the couch, they couldn’t go out and enjoy the activities that they used to, they longed to dance at their daughter’s wedding and have that first dance, but they were just in pain. So you need to create empathy for the hero in your content. And so you can talk about this individual either in the third person or in the first person. We found for a lot of smaller solo practitioners, health coaches that talking about this in the first person works really well. And for larger health care clinics oftentimes having an individual tell their story works really well.

06:00 CM: So you want to show how misfortune has affected the character as a way to develop that sympathy. And you also want to make the hero likable. You can’t have a villain as that hero especially in these ads. So, the next thing is you need to present an opportunity that this main character, the main hero has faced. And so this can be an event that’s never happened to them before. So they learned a secret. They heard about a specialist in the area, they heard about one of your physicians and the services that you offer. And so the hero then takes action. And, as it transitions into this new situation, what’s at stake? What are those big questions that they have? And now it’s a chance to show how they actually pursued their goal of being able to dance at their daughter’s wedding.

07:10 CM: They took action and they accomplished their goal by coming in to see your specialist. By booking that first appointment, they were able to put their fears aside and to understand how knee replacement surgery has come a long way. And so you want to make sure that you are building up a climax and showing how this hero has taken their pain and found a solution and then actually acted on it. And then here is when you show the transformation. So you’re telling about what life was like after. You start with before, how bad everything was. They find the solution, they take action and then you have the transformation. We’ve been finding that having a testimonial within this transformation piece can work really well to provide social proof that the transformation actually worked. And if you are an expert, you are the specialist that you say you are able to help people, I’m sure you will be able to find one of those testimonials.

08:17 CM: So we really enjoy following this… Enjoy… [chuckle] We found a lot of success following this hero’s journey as we’re putting together the language that we use in the Facebook ad. So then I mentioned rather than sending somebody directly to a website that just is part of your site as a whole, really directing them to a landing page. So we take some of those key benefits that we’re identifying within this Hero’s Journey of all the things that they could accomplish after that transformation and we put those benefits onto the landing page. We can also put a video of the specialist that actually allowed that transformation to happen. And so you can do a quick video of one of your physicians, one of your doctors, or even yourself in there, just to build trust, get people to know, like, and trust your brand and to allow people to come face-to-face with who they would be meeting at your practice.

09:21 CM: From here we have that schedule appointment now. For smaller solopreneurs you could have an e-book or a checklist to grow your email list. We also do recommend that for healthcare centers. But if you really wanna see that immediate return, scheduling the appointments, having this here is a great idea. So, to build your landing page, we utilize a tool, Lead Pages. It’s just leadpages.com, you can sign up for an account there, and we build basically all of our landing pages through here, and they’re just very simple layouts. So, as I mentioned, we take the benefits, we put them on one side, we have a video, and we have the schedule now, and a headline up at the top with maybe your logo.

10:20 CM: And so it’s just very clear and crisp and has one call to action. They don’t then see all of the links at the top of the website, and start clicking around to learn more and forget that they were even there to book an appointment. This is to get people to take action immediately. From here we have lead pages actually send out an initial email to anybody who signs up for the consultation or to download a resource from you. And we have lead pages also host the “Thank You” page. So on the “Thank You” page is where you can provide even more information about the clinic, link to the website, and things like that. Sometimes we even build that “Thank You” page directly onto the website so that they can then start poking around and learning more about your practice.

11:17 CM: And how this works if somebody clicks on the Facebook ad. You’re targeting them based on interests, geographic location. Maybe there are people who have been to your website, and because you have the pixel installed on your website, or in a different landing page, you can re-market to them. Potentially you have an email list, and you can create a lookalike audience for that email list. And so you have this audience, you direct them to the landing page. After that landing page which we build on lead pages, we put the code directly onto your website, so it could be a WordPress website, you just use a plugin, it’s super simple. Other websites, you can take the HTML code from lead pages, plug it into a page on your website for more control and flexibility. Lead Pages does A/B testing, kinda just built in so you can try different designs, you could try having a video, not having a video, changing colors or language, and it will all automatically process for you.

12:25 CM: So they get to the landing page, they fill out the information, they got sent a welcome email as well as redirected to a thank you page where they can learn more about your practice. And the reason why we do this is because we really feel as though if you want to help the folks in your community who are struggling and who need your clinics support and expertise, that you need to create a system and a messaging that’s going to make it as simple as possible for them to move forward and take that next step. We have just found such great success with this process. Typically, you might start out and you might get the messaging wrong, and that’s okay, at least you’re getting the information and the data to then make a new decision in the future.

13:27 CM: So, as I mentioned before, if you are currently running ads and you don’t know how well they’re converting, or you think that they’re just going to a page on your website that may or may not have a little form on the side of the page, please reach out to us. We would love to chat, love to dive into what you do have going on, just for a free consultation where we can tell you the steps that you can take in order to optimize that advertising campaign. Of course we do also work as your external marketing department, and we can help manage those lead funnels as well. So, again, my name is Caitlin McDonald, I am the co-founder of Social Speak Network, you’ve been listening to the Social Speak Network podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and we will see you next week.

/by