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.

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.

 

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

7 steps to creating an FAQ Page that attracts new clients for your Medical Practice

7 Steps to creating an FAQ Page that attracts new clients for your Medical Practice

In this blog post I am taking a look at the steps for you to take to optimize a FAQ page on your website so that it not only is indexed in Google, but also so that it attracts new patients and can be repurposed in additional digital marketing for your medical practice.

FAQ sections of your healthcare website at one point were incredibly important, they then, however, were looked down at by a a lot of copy writers and website developers because the questions should be answered elsewhere on your website. The professional digital marketers at Social Speak Network used to even argue that an FAQ section would be better served by creating blog posts rather than having each of the questions listed on a single page. Our tune has now changed.

FAQ sections, whether they are single pages devoted to answering commonly asked questions or sections spread throughout a website that appear on specific services specialties pages, can drastically effect the performance of your health center website. These FAQ sections:

  • Increase search engine optimization (and possibility of having a Featured Snippet on Google search results)
  • Increase the likelihood of matching voice search (increasing Mobile SEO for your medical practice)
  • Build brand authority
  • Get prospects to know, like and trust your clinic
  • Create digital marketing collateral that can then be repurposed in email marketing, initial consultations with prospects, and social media posts.

Additionally, you can still provide expanded answers to these commonly asked questions in the form of blog posts and article. Now, before we dive deeper, let’s take a look at what a Featured Snippet is on Google.

What are Featured Snippets in Google Search Results?

When users ask questions in Google Search, one of the answers that appears may be a Featured Snippet. The information that appears here is extracted from a webpage and displayed to the user. Whereas you can utilize Knowledge Graph or Rick Snippets to display additional information within your search results, you cannot actually control what shows up for a Featured Snippet.

Featured Snippets are a part of the search results. In simple terms, Google finds content that matches the question asked and displays this result at a Featured Snippet.

Because of Google highlighting and emphasizing what it deems as the best answer to a question asked, it is incredibly important to add an FAQ section(s) to your Medical Practice Website.

So, how do you Create a FAQ Page that Converts on your Health Center Website?

The process to creating an FAQ section on your website is fairly straight forward. In this blog post we take a step by step look at how to create a well-functioning FAQ page on your medical practice website.

  1. Group Questions at top of the page
  2. Add headers or sections within the questions so they are easier to navigate
  3. Link questions to their respective answers lower on the page
  4. Create a concise and clear answer to each question
  5. Record a video of the answer to each question
  6. Add your brand name or a physicians name to the first line of the question
  7. Add a link in the answer to the service or next step in the sales funnel for the individual to learn more.

Look for “People also ask for” questions on Google Search Results

  1. Group questions at the top of the page.

    When you group questions together, this could either be at the top of the page or at a top of a section on a page, you are making it easier for the user, or prospect, to quickly jump to the information that appeals to them.

    Having a user-friendly website increases trust in your medical practice brand.

    faq questions grouped
    This also helps to keep an individual on your site for longer if they do not need to scan through all the content and questions to find exactly what they are looking for.

  2. Add headers or sections within the questions so they are easier to navigate.

    Here, you want to make sure, again, that the answers to common questions are easy to find quickly. For an orthopedic practice, for example, you may have sections for:

    • Your Initial Consultation
    • Preparing for Surgery
    • What to Expect at Your Appointment
    • Recovery Post-Procedure

    Within these sections, you may have numerous questions, all of which are talking points for your physicians to patients and prospects. To figure out what questions to include on your FAQ page, think of the different steps within your patient lifetime journey.

    Focus your Commonly Asked Questions on the Patient Journey

    What are the first questions they will have for your healthcare practice as they are first realizing they may need care? What questions do they have for your specialists to best prepare them for a procedure, and what questions will they have for a quick recovery? As you are writing the content try to predict what related questions an individual may ask. Additionally, ask the admin staff and the specialists at your medical practice what common questions they answer.

    Google also can provide insights into commonly asked questions. Type in a broad question into Google. For example “What to expect the day of knee surgery?” When you scroll down in the search results, you will notice a section titled “People also ask” – Google is providing you with additional questions to consider for your health center FAQ.

    Google search results for knee surgery(You’ll also notice that for this search, there also is no Featured Snippet – time to get working on that FAQ…)

  3. You’ll notice that I’ve followed this advice in this blog. As you grow out the list of commonly asked questions for your medical practice, it makes it much more navigable to list the questions first and the link to the answers. Having a link that goes directly to the answer also allows you to share this answer in correspondence with patients, prospects, and on social media. It makes repurposing content that much easier for your business.

    Create HTML links for each question and answer within your Healthcare Center FAQ

    To create a link to a specific place in the text, use the following code:

    Create the Link: 
    Where you are adding the link, rather than entering a complete destination URL, simply enter #destination-id (use the respective ‘destination id’). In the page HTML, this will look like: <a href=”#destination-id”>Link Text</a>
    Select the Destination: To identify where you would like the link created above to go to, you will assign a div id to the content. In the HTML of the page, add: <div id=”destination-id”>Content Header to Link To</div>

  4. Create a concise and clear answer to each question

    This ties directly into the previous points described about writing a powerful FAQ section on your health practice website that drives traffic to your website and new patients to your clinic.  When you write an answer to a commonly asked question, you want to make sure to be as concise as possible and then drive the reader to another page/blog post/to schedule an appointment to learn more.

    When you purposefully don’t answer specific questions and when you leave your answers short, you can lead the prospect through the sales funnel.

  5. Record a video of the answer to each question.

    Videos, videos, videos! Video marketing is one of the most important strategies for your medical practice digital marketing. We highly recommend having physicians in your clinic film their answers to these questions.

    video in faq
    If a prospect can put a face to a name and if the physician provides a clear-concise answer, your practice is set up to quickly build trust and authority with prospects. Videos help to:

    • Build trust with prospects and set expectations about what the process is like with your health center.
    • Create additional opportunities for Search Engine Optimization. Videos are indexed in addition to the content on your pages. We recommend publishing the video on YouTube and then embedding it on your website. When you use the question being answered in the title, your video is very likely to appear in the search results.
      Google video search results
    • Lastly, having videos embedded within your health care commonly asked question, adds additional content for your marketing team to share on social media, email marketing, and in advertising.

    One of our favorite parts about video marketing for healthcare is that you no longer need to create a $10,000 5 minute video. In fact, just using a newer phone and a $20 microphone will do the trick. Authentic videos that are not highly edited work well for FAQ sections on your website.

  6. Add your brand name or a physicians name to the first line of the question

    Rather than just answering the commonly asked question, make an effort to include your health practice name or a physician’s name in the answer. Not only does this increase credibility, but it also builds name recognition.

    While we have had some digital marketing clients tell us that the content reads strangely with the practice name at the start of each answer, also realize that 1) your readers won’t be reading every question if you are structuring the content so it is easy to find what you are looking for (eg grouping questions by category) and 2) if one of your Q&As are selected for a featured snippet on Google, you’ll benefit that much more if your practice name also appears.

    Social Speak often recommends having the name of whichever specialist is in your video have their name in the answer, as well. This is an easy way to have the content be cohesive.

  7. FAQ pages on your medical practice website fulfill a much needed role of predicting what prospects and patients are going to ask. While you want to be thoughtful of answering as many commonly asked questions as possible, you also want to lead users (prospects mostly) through the patient journey of scheduling and coming in for an appointment.

    Include the answers to questions, but also lead people to additional content and ultimately to pick up the phone or click the link to schedule a consultation.

 

 

How to Create a FAQ Page that Converts on your Health Center Website
 How to Create a FAQ Section on your Health Center Website that Actually Attracts New Patient
Healthcare Digital Marketing insights with Gold Medical Marketing Founder Daniel Goldberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they built around branding and brand recognition?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set your Healthcare Marketing Budget Quarterly Rather than Annually

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the Healthcare Marketing Podcast Interview

Watch the Digital Marketing for Orthopaedic Centers Interview

 

Complete Transcript for Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C: I mean, even three years ago.

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

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

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

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

How does your Orthopaedic Website Increase your bottom line?

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

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

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

The front door of your practice is now your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Three Marketing Tactics a Medical Practice Should Be Doing Online

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

D: That comes down to understanding the patient journey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, that’s a whole different metric now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D: Not that I can think of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healthcare Digital Marketing insights with Gold Medical Marketing Founder Daniel Goldberg
Medical Practice Buyer Persona and Digital Marketing Advice for Healthcare Centers

Marketing articles often talk about understanding your buyer persona or your target market, but often times you need to read between the lines to find tactics that you can implement for your health care center.

In this article we take advice from some of the top marketing experts for medical center marketing and highlight how you can tailor your marketing towards your practice’s target market by:

  • Using interactive resources
  • Creating campaigns that are specifically geared towards immediate leads and long-term brand recognition
  • Creating an in depth FAQ section on your website to address both services and conditions.

Before diving into these tactics, it’s important to understand the strategy behind your buyer persona or target market. When first considered, we often to grouping all patients together and looking at broad identifiers. I’ve heard our clients proclaim our patients consist of men and women aged 40-65+. Honestly, this doesn’t do much.  The goal should be to find sub-groups and niches within your specialties and communicate to the heart of that niche.

What is your Medical Practice Buyer Persona?

Rather than grouping all patients together, start by understanding your specialties. Let’s say you work for an orthopedic center and specialize in joint pain and back pain as two key conditions – who are the specific candidates you can target for these two specialties.

Chris Carr, CEO of Farotech, recommends thinking about what are people doing when they need your services. For example, if a specialty is shoulder pain, you could target baseball players, specifically pitchers, or you could target someone who does handy-work around the home and fell off a ladder. What other services, however, are these people going to need? You treat the individual who fell off a ladder, and they might not necessarily have other ailments. You treat the baseball player, and next thing you know they are coming back for knee pain, back pain, and other ailments they may have been putting off.

Another example is knee pain. Most people put off their decision to have knee surgery, are they grateful after they come in? Yes! After a good experience are they more open to considering intervention for their hip or their other knee? Yes! Having brand recognition for these individuals can greatly improve the customer (or patient) lifetime value, something all practices should strive to do. To understand this target market, you need to understand the emotional journey they go through as they take the steps to pick up the phone and call your practice.

The first exercise to understand your buyer persona is to write a list or create a spreadsheet with your practice’s specialties, what patients typically come in for these, and what other services they may need after the fact. Once you have completed this exercise, rank the specific buyer personas based on both low hanging fruit (or who will schedule calls quickly) and typical customer lifetime value (folks who often have more than one procedure once they schedule their first appointment).

Abby Thompson of Salted Stone recommends also performing a quarterly review of who is coming into your practice – what are their symptoms, how did they find you, etc. Actually speak with your patients to understand their journey and to further your understanding of your target markets outlined in the spreadsheet you’ve created.

Once you have a clear understanding of your patient personas, you can start integrating them into your medical practice digital marketing strategy.

3 Tested Tactics to Integrate Patient Journey in Digital Marketing Strategy

Tactic 1: Create Interactive Resources that speak to the main concerns, questions, and pain points of your niche target markets.

Thompson has started utilizing quizzes, ebooks,  and interactive video to draw prospects in, engage them, and increase ROI. To create these interactive elements, focus your attention on answering the most daunting questions and concerns of your target market.

Some ideas to think about could be a step by step guide to exercises to do at home to build strength prior to a surgery or a video interview with a physician explaining the exact process used in a procedure. Capture the name and contact information of the individual interested in the resource and send them targeted information that brings them further along in their patient journey.

Tactic 2: Build advertising campaigns that are specifically geared towards immediate leads and long-term brand recognition.

As mentioned, some prospects are ready to call your practice right away whereas others take time to nurture. Daniel Goldberg, founder and CEO of Gold Medical Marketing, tends to emphasize with his clients that you can’t have the same goals for every campaign. Some advertising campaigns should be designed to capture leads immediately, but others need to align more with the patient journey.

Your practice needs to build brand recognition and instill trust with prospects before they are ready to pick up their phone for an initial consultation. Here, specifically think about display ads and retargeting campaigns.

Tactic 3: Create an in depth FAQ section on your website to address both services and conditions.

This is one of the most common techniques, and most valuable techniques for your practice to build an organic reach, create content that speaks to your buyer personas, and increase brand recognition.

Both Carr and John McAlpin, SEO Director of Cardinal Digital, highlight the importance of utilizing FAQ sections to interact with your buyer personas. Just as Thompson and Goldman recommend paying attention to the key concerns, questions, and pain points of your target patients, creating an FAQ section of your site or an FAQ section on each specialty can increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy exponentially.

Carr recommends creating short videos to answer each question in addition to a written answer. These videos can then be repurposed as you send targeted emails to your buyers and can be shared online through social media and other channels. As you map out the full buyer-journey, each video will serve a specific purpose.

McAlpin on the other hand focuses on the technical SEO benefit to an FAQ section of your specialty page. Every specific question and answer creates an opportunity for your website to rank more prominently for Voice Searches. By appearing in organic search results you can build trust, brand recognition, grow your website traffic, and ultimately reduce your patient acquisition costs.

When pooled together, these tactics work to provide the answers to questions and settle the fears of your prospects as they move through their own patient journeys.

As you are working through ways to incorporate your buyer persona and patient journey, don’t hesitate to reach out for a complementary consultation. Our team works closely with marketing directors at healthcare centers to ensure their marketing is reaching the right prospects as they progress through their own journey. We use a combination of techniques from building brand loyalty to capturing lead contact information, and systematically converting prospects into patients as we help you to grow your practice’s bottom line.

Medical Practice Buyer Persona and Digital Marketing Advice for Healthcare Centers
Social Speak Podcast chris carr with Farotech

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Podcast Episode with Chris Carr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC: Sure, well let me share my screen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current Digital Marketing Trends for Orthopedics Practices in 2019

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

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

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

Website Evolution for Orthopedics Clinics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We do the same testing and mobile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Marketing for your Health Clinic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essentially… we’re losing to gold fish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC: That’s right, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the difference between Local SEO and Traditional SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We write everything in collaborative documents.

Everything should be connected to an editorial calendar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s profitable, and it’s fireable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Speak Podcast John McAlpin

John is a technical SEO expert who’s deeply engaged in the local and national SEO community. With over 15 years of web management experience, John has led digital strategy for many enterprise healthcare companies such as Epic Health Services, Aveanna Healthcare, Cornerstone Healthcare Group, and more!

Founded in 2009, Cardinal Digital Marketing has been ranked the #1 fastest growing agency in the Southeast (The Agency 100). In addition, they have been consecutively named on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing privately-held US companies in 2014 and 2015. The agency has also been a multi-year recipient of the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Pacesetter Awards as well as selected as one of the 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For®.

Cardinal keeps pace with rapidly shifting trends in Digital Marketing, and develops engagement strategies that are not defined by a platform or a category, but leverage the best marketing vehicle to solve every unique challenge. They approach every situation with the client’s customer in mind and measure success not by increased traffic or impressions, but instead higher client profits.

Services offered include Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, Social Media Management, Web Design & Development, Mobile Marketing, Online Reputation Management, Web Analytics, and more. What are your specialties?

In this interview we focused on SEO and search marketing for health and wellness businesses. We covered:

  • The difference between SEO and Search Marketing and how this differs from other types of digital marketing.
  • Current trends are you seeing for wellness practices with SEO marketing in 2019.
  • Tactics that were expected to perform well or had a lot of hype, but failed to take hold in 2018.
  • The top 3 things that a wellness center should be doing online to see a return from their SEM efforts.
  • The top strategy that should be followed, but often marketing teams get it wrong.
  • Marketing strategies your team is currently testing that you don’t think many other agencies are implementing for their clients.

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

Podcast Transcript:

Hello my name is Caitlin McDonald, and welcome to the most recent episode of the Social Speak podcast. I am so excited, today we are joined by SEO expert John McAlpin. Now, John works for Cardinal Digital Marketing. Founded in 2009, Cardinal digital marketing has been ranked number one of fastest growing agencies in the South East. In addition, they have consecutively been named on the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing privately held companies in 2014 and 2015.

Cardinal keeps pace with the rapidly shifting trends in digital marketing and develops engagement strategies that are not defined by a platform or a category, but leverage the best marketing vehicle to solve every unique challenge. They approach every situation with the client’s customer in mind, and measure success not by increased traffic or impressions, but instead, higher client profits. Services offered include search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, mobile marketing, online reputation management, web analytics and more.

Our guest, John is a technical SEO expert, who’s deeply engaged in the local and national SEO community. With over 15 years of web management experience John has led digital strategy for many enterprise healthcare companies such as Epic Health Services, Cornerstone Healthcare Group, and more so let’s give a warm welcome to John.

Caitlin: Welcome John, we’re so excited to have you on the show today.

To kick things off. Tell us a little bit about your background in digital marketing.

John: Sure, it actually started way back when I was 11. I started building websites when I was 11. I found it interesting and saw my dad doing it So, I found W3 schools and started teaching myself how to do all that. But at a professional portion of my career I started in the corporate side, mostly in a tech field, international e-commerce, and then I moved into healthcare and fell in love immediately. I was doing full digital strategy for a healthcare company, and then from there, I transitioned to a agency life and never looked back really. I love agency life. It’s nice to get a little mix of everything.

C: Yes, it definitely is. There’s always a new project to be working on … So John a key aspect of Cardinal digital focuses on SEO and search marketing. Can you describe how this differs from other types of digital marketing?

J: Sure, on it’s own this is a really interesting topic. A lot of people get confused about the actual true definition of SEM. I even heard people consider Social media as a part of SEM and so I think it’s really important to know the difference. Search engine marketing is any type of marketing that has to deal with a search engine. Specifically people refer to it with paid search, like PPC or CPC however you want to refer it to, or SEO. And so that’s essentially search engine marketing. While things like social media channels, have a search box that’s different than a search engine. It is important to note. And so search marketing really is just another form of inbound marketing and what’s unique about it compared to other things, is you’re catching both people during the discovery phase, where there’s no intent to purchase, and during the intent to purchase phase.

C: Great, great thank you for diving into that. So what current trends are you seeing for wellness practices with the SEO and SEM in 2019?

J: What people are in healthcare are starting to do is find alternative ways for people to book appointments. Traditionally it starts with a call then developed. Now we’ve got great technology to book appointments on the website, but now it’s gonna find alternative way to give people more options, to book appointments.

Something that we’re doing is Google My business is actually having features to help integrate their platforms truly need to visit your website, to book an appointment, you can even text or even other direct links. There are some other third-party industry sites like if they’re a directory that we can book appointment straight from there. For example, in the restaurant space Yelp, you can order straight from Yelp. And so, the future is hoping to get voice functionality working out. So all you’re a home assistant, such as Alexa, to help book appointments, that’s a future hope. I don’t know if you were gonna get there, in 2019, but it’s definitely in pain that see a lot of people going towards.

C: That’s pretty incredible. So I’d just be able to say “Alexa, schedule my appointment with this center,” and to be able to do it.

J: Right. I predicted to see a specific company, not a healthcare company, but a technology company developing an application. There’s a lot of partners with it, who are trying to work together to develop this type of technology, so I see it being… You signed up with a partner and they will add you to their list, of preferred vendors, and then you would be able to use their system. That’s the place I see this going.

C: That is incredible, that’s wonderful. Now, in a previous podcast episode, and this isn’t something that we talked about previously, but in a previous podcast episode one of our guest Abby was talking about how interactive websites is actually really helping out with SEO because people have more time on site. A lot of health care centers, direct people off-site to do the scheduling and booking. Is it better to have the scheduling tool actually embedded on your website, rather than directing someone off-site?

J: So, that’s an interesting topic because there’s a couple of things that you wanna think about here. Not just your SEO interactivity, but also how you track conversion. A lot and people who have booking on their site or using an Iframe, which means that your analytics may not be able to track.

And so, really it gets to the point where Google is aimed more to the user experience and that’s where people get that time-on-site type of metric, and technically it’s better to have people to book on your site versus off because it’s less steps to take an action, but in a perfect world we be able to develop software to have booking on our site, and have our own proprietary thing. But, not everyone has those kind of resources. And so it is really however you can get the job done. An Iframe will work. Just be careful about what you’re tracking. As marketers, it is hard for us, so we don’t always have the ability to track it. Cardinal specifically does a good job of working with a whole lot of vendors to make sure that we can get the information that you need, but a lot of agencies don’t have that reach or those resources so be careful.

C: Alright, so let’s jump to the next question, are there any tactics that were expected for well or had a lot of hype, but failed to really take hold in 2018?

J: Voice. I think, voice is gonna be a big one. It’s not the future. It’s now. Some data scientists are predicting that 50% of all searches, are gonna be voice by next year. And I think this is a little confusing because people are getting confused between Voice Search and Voice Assistance.

Asking for the weather, asking certain time or something like that. It’s just those are voice assistance not voice search. And so right now we don’t really have a good way to track search. Also, it is important to note that your Search Console data, a lot of these queries can be voice and Google won’t be telling you which are voice.

I’m sure they will, but they’re not telling you right now. It’s also important to know that as far as asking questions that come from your website, all answers are first position featured snippets. They wanted to be voice focus on getting those featured snippets ranking high. And it’s important to know that feature snippets can appear anywhere in the search and only 30% are in position one.

C: Is there any way to be able to do research about how voice searches and the phrases and terminology that people are using and search differ from me typing into a search engine for something?

J: So as far as tracking or as far as optimizing?

C: As far as optimizing.

J: Sure it’s really just answering commonly add questions that you can relate to your business. Anyone can really get a question answered, but that doesn’t really lead to a conversion or help your branding at all.

So if you really wanted to optimize for voice, currently, before the future hits, it’s really answer the questions as quickly as you can. One of two sentences, the question needs to be answered. A lot of people will try to think about word count, not word quality. So they add all of these filler words. Work to really answered the question directly, in a first two sentences. The rest of that page can be or filler content.

Yeah, and those first two sentences, then you can work your brand name and according to Dr. So and So, at whatever your business name, is, the flu can be treated if caught earlier.

That was a the brand recall there. They can go and search that later or if they just are searching that question online at all, on the paper knows your name at the features on it. Oh, the that’s who I heard that from. And they can follow group.

C: I assume that that’s going to be one of the answers to this next question, but what are the top three things that a wellness center should be doing online to see a return from their SEM efforts?

J: Actually, it’s not one of the three in a lot of the…

There a more important foundational things that people need to worry about. A as far as voice, yes. One of the things I focus on Q+ A answer format. Include all of your services include all of your conditions on separate pages and have a way to inter-link them, Focus on your internal in-between them, so that they can relate and people can learn more information.

One of the first things they need to do is focus on having clean citations and for people that don’t know is a caption. That’s just your directory listing thing about Google My Business, Yelp. And then also think about your industry-specific citations.

Rate My doctor and things like that.

These directories have a huge impact on voice search and how business appear – having a consistent citations in.

So there’s a lot of tools that help it is or you can do it manually, but a lot more work, but you can pay more to have is, will do it for us if a lot of out there for it so I think the biggest factor that wellness centers and we really need to focus on is the user experience.

You can do SEO to a crap site. But if it doesn’t convert and people are turned off by it, they can’t navigate through it, it doesn’t mean anything that is so important.

Yeah, you can put a Band-Aid on it. But it’s not going lead to the results that you need in the end. And I feel as though Google with its algorithm,  says, “Well it’s ranking site’s higher that have that positive user experience. People are staying on the site longer, they’re going directly to it.”

C: And then, let’s see, what is the top strategy that should be followed but often marketing teams at these health and wellness centers get wrong or other agencies, just get wrong?

J: So SEO, technical SEO, that’s the first thing I noticed that it’s wrong, but really the biggest missed opportunity is having a holistic digital marketing strategy and having your teams to silo doing their own things, not so picking on the same goals or focus or when teams are working on different  ways to achieve different tactics towards the same goal.

Specifically, they need to be blending to the technical side of SEO, PPC, social media and their content. Repurpose your content for different channels.

C: That’s great, that’s great. You work for Cardinal digital, which is a full service agency and one of the top-ranked inbound marketing agencies in the US. Tell us about your company and your services, because you do really merge all of those different silos together for work with your clients.

J: As a strategy partner, we use the term partner, because it really is a relationship that we try to build, we try to build long-term collaborative relationships with national enterprise healthcare companies, because not one company is the same as the other, and everyone deserves a customize strategy. There’s no recycled formula for everyone … See what works best for everyone. We also have a really strong paid media team, and extremely simple track or record merging all of our tactics that blended to re-All full welcome out strategy.

C: Are there any marketing strategies that your team is currently testing that you don’t think many other agencies are implementing for their clients?

J: Sure almost doing a lot of the same one-off tactics and traditional SEO things, and payments paid media, but one of the things that we do is that I’ve seen that I have not seen other agencies really focus on is develop cascading edge tracking software.

We’re trying to use every tool the book to make sure that we can unlock the most insights so we can do the best action because really we put the data in the hands of our clients.

This is what we’re seeing our recommendation and this is how we collaborate with our clients, so, but they are fully aware of every step and they can make the best position possible because we give them the best information possible, and that to be anything from, not just keyword tracking, but also heatmap tracking it seems… How users are actually interacting on their site, so we can have the full holistic US experience.

C: Definitely, definitely, that’s great. And then, John, is there anything that I should have asked but I didn’t?

J: Yes, a lot of questions, I don’t know. I think you have a great job…

C: Awesome, well thank you so much for joining us, has been such a pleasure learning about your experience, your take on SEO and SEM and some of what Cardinal Digital is doing for their clients. So thank you again for joining us today.

J: Thanks so much for having me.

C: Wow, thank you, thank you, thank you to John for joining us today. He shared such wonderful information and it’s no wonder Cardinal digital is such a top-ranked agency with talent like John.

We spoke today about optimizing your directory listings, including both services and conditions pages on your website, as well as how to increase your exposure for voice search by having an FAQ section on your website. All of these are simple tips that you’ll be able to implement on your wellness website to help out with SEO and SEM.

Thank you again for tuning in, thank you to our guest, John for joining us today, and I will see you on the next episode of The Social speak podcast.

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

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

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

In this episode, Abby provides insight into:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inbound Marketing Tips Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flywheel Approach to Marketing from Hubspot

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

Current Inbound Marketing Trends for Wellness Practices in 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C: A great insight, thank you Abby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interactive Experiences creates an exceptional ROI for your healthcare center

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

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

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

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

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

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

C: Yes, the power of data.

A: Yes, for sure!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salted Stone as your Trusted Inbound Marketing Agency Partner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unknown Inbound Strategies that can put your Practice on the Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The key marketing strategy most wellness centers get wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Content Management Technologies of 2019 #inboundmarketing #contentmarketing

With all the tools out there it can be difficult to know which content marketing strategy tool you and your marketing team should be utilizing to make sure everybody is moving in the same direction.

In this blog we take a look at the most prominent content marketing calendar apps that are available for many different sized businesses. For small businesses, including those with just one marketing manager, you can get away with organizing your ideas in a Word document or a Google sheet.

However, once you have multiple people working towards that same goal of making sure your business is found and sharing the correct message in your marketing strategy, it is important to consider upgrading to a scheduling and management interface that allows everybody to clearly see where their piece of the pie fits in with the larger content strategy.

To keep you from signing up for each of these tools, I’ve taken a look at:

  • What type of organization it is best for
  • The main features
  • How you can implement it easily into your team
  • The price point.

Many of the applications discussed including Monday.com, HubSpot, CoSchedule, and MeetEdgar have a variety of price points. Again, in our experience, if it is just you, typically you can get away with organizing your ideas on a spreadsheet.

So, let’s dive into there popular content management platforms.

CoSchedule Technology for Digital Marketing Management

The first application that we are going to discuss is CoSchedule. CoSchedule creates One calendar that allows everybody to be on the same page, it allows everybody to communicate in one place.

Additionally, with the more advanced plans of CoSchedule, you can organize everything from event planning through to email marketing, social media, and blogging. CoSchedule is incredible tool for large teams and complex marketing organization. One of my favorite aspects of CoSchedule is the ability to create ongoing follow-up social media links to blog posts in one or two clicks.

CoSchedule for Solopreneurs

For solopreneurs, CoSchedule is a little More expensive than other options. Solo plans do start at $0 to $20 per month, with most individuals looking at the $40 per month option – typically a spreadsheet along with one of the less expensive tools will do the trick.

Where CoSchedule really shines is with in-house marketing teams looking to manage full-scale campaigns.

The professional plan starts at $400 per month, and allows workflows approval flows multiple calendars and comes with a dedicated account manager. From a project management standpoint, this plan reduces the need for multiple individuals providing guidance on any given combination of marketing strategies.

Hubspot vs Coschedule for content management software

Best Content Management Technologies of 2019, Hubspot vs Coschedule for content management software, #inboundmarketing #contentmarketing

Best Content Management Technologies of 2019, Hubspot vs Coschedule for content management software #inboundmarketing #contentmarketing

Best Content Management Technologies of 2019, Hubspot vs Coschedule for content management software #inboundmarketing #contentmarketing

Best Content Management Technologies of 2019, Hubspot vs Coschedule for content management software #inboundmarketing #contentmarketing

HubSpot for Content Marketing Management

Many of us are very familiar with HubSpot. HubSpot has a combination of three tools and complete inbound marketing management resources. HubSpot places the emphasis on collecting inbound leads from your social media and digital marketing content. Though there are numerous tools that you can use to create the same systems and processes, HubSpot’s value proposition is that everything is in one place.

HubSpot for Larger Teams

Our favorite plan within HubSpot, is again there professional plan. Though the Enterprise option has much more advanced settings such as predictive lead scoring, it is a much higher investment. With the professional plan at $800/month, you have access to SEO and content strategy, social media, calls to action and landing pages.

Additionally, there is a/b testing marketing automation, smart content, and the ability to add teams.

The workflows are easy to set up, and create very systematized automation within your marketing and strategy. This tool, HubSpot, is a great option for businesses that have a marketing team, and want to make sure that every aspect of their marketing is working together. Again, HubSpot places inbound leads at the forefront of all of their software.

Next up, is Monday.com.

Monday.com to Organize your Content

Monday allows you to customize your workflow and dealt out strategies to multiple different teams. Monday is a great project management tool, however we found it a little difficult to manage a Content strategy and editorial calendar. The use of Gandt charts seems like a great idea, but it made projects difficult to understand exactly what steps needed to be completed and if we were on track. Many of our processes tend to be one or two steps, so again it seemed like a little too much for social media management.

Monday for Project Management

With plans starting at $25 per month, and unlimited boards, Monday is a great opportunity to integrate into your workflow if you need to do more project management rather than content creation and syndication. Because there is no central calendar, it can be difficult at times to see how each of the boards really work together.

Another positive for Monday, is the time tracking capabilities, so each member of your team can have a clear understanding of the time spent on each task. This allows you to easily understand if some aspect of marketing is taking much longer than others.

Additionally, Monday.com could be used for larger marketing promotions, however, most businesses need a tool that also works for day-to-day management.

The next tool we will take a look at is Edgar.

Edgar for Content Marketing Organization

Edgar is a great option for businesses looking for a simple tool to manage their social media posting. Typically, we recommend you create a database of content. The content strategy video below, provides tips for places we recommend Gathering content ideas. Once you have all of the content, click go and Edgar will talk into action.

MeetEdgar for Small Business Social Media Management

We recommend small businesses and solopreneurs look at Edgar as an option for their social media management. One issue with this, is that it does not allow you to clearly see the complete marketing strategy picture.

Each aspect of your digital marketing content calendar and content strategy still exists in its own space. Meet Edgar is a great tool for teams to use that do not have very complex marketing promotions in place. If you are one person team it can be an excellent resource for you.

Because I mentioned meet Edgar, I also should mention that for social media management, we utilize at such as Tailwind, Later App, Buffer, and HootSuite. I won’t go into it because he’s here, because they are more for just social media management.

Our blog on Social Media Content Strategy shares additional information regarding how to use each of these tools and where they fit into your social media marketing management strategy.

Create Clear Goals for What you want to accomplish with a content marketing technology

Before settling on a tool and diving into figuring out the setup and on-boarding your team, make sure you are clear about the goals you hope to achieve through using the software. Remember, choosing a tool to help keep track of marketing campaigns and content creation still requires that you understand what topics you plan to discuss and having your team actually write the content.

We have other blogs and videos that cover how to identify key topics to include in your content marketing editorial calendar, as well as a structure to follow for creating your editorial calendar. We often recommend starting with a word doc or spreadsheet rather than immediately hoping into the software you choose. Again, this helps to make sure your team is all on the same page as you move forward with your inbound marketing strategy.

For more reading please visit:

How to easily write a business blog post in 2019
How to Easily Write a Long Blog Post for your Business
Finding Topics Your Tribe Will Love [Video]
How to Use Your Values to Create Exceptional Content for Your Business
Content at your finger tips
Hubspot vs Coschedule for content management software