Digital marketing is becoming the new wave of healthcare marketing. With the growing competition in the healthcare industry, it is important to stay on top of digital marketing and keep your organization at the forefront of change.
Ever wonder what it takes to create a successful healthcare marketing campaign?
We listed down some tips that you can incorporate into your marketing plan right away.
Know your target audience
A successful healthcare marketing campaigns starts with knowing who your audience is and what they value. To produce great results, you first need to create a well-defined persona profile.
Vividly picture who is it that you want to attract to your doorstep and what matters most to them. The more specifically you define your audience, the more likely you are to inspire a positive response.
Carefully and precisely defining your target audience will ensure that you’re not making the wrong assumption about what your audience values. Plus, it will improve your efficiency since you’ll have a good idea about what media to use and how to shape a compelling message that brings a response.
Combine healthcare and social media
Today, social media isn’t just a place for family and friends to stay in touch. It also allows doctors and medical experts to connect with their current and potential patients.
Now that you know who your target audience is, use social media to reach your key audience. Tapping into online communities and sharing health information can be a game-changer in your healthcare marketing plan. Keep in mind, though, that each platform has its own voice and audience. When you create social media content, make sure that the message is tailored to different audience and channels.
Make wellness a lot more fun
Health and wellness is a serious topic, but that doesn’t mean that your campaign should be boring and uninspiring. Let’s take cues from UnitedHealthCare’s successful healthcare marketing campaign – We Dare You.
UnitedHealthcare created an interactive campaign that dares people to make one small change to live healthier lives and document it on social media. Each month, there are new challenges and quizzes aimed at inspiring people to live a healthier lifestyle. There are prizes involved too.
The multi-awarded “We Dare You” campaign not only led to healthier habits, but it also fostered an interactive online community of brand loyalists.
Establish an email marketing plan
Email marketing is an effective means of transmitting messages to your current and prospective audience. In fact, studies suggest that email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers as compared to Facebook and Twitter. When done right, it can help you grow your practice and reach a larger amount of patients.
With email marketing, the audience is openly receptive, and relative cost is low, and the rate of return can be exceptionally high. You can promote your services in a cost-effective way while building a relationship with your patients.
Google yourself
Studies suggest that physicians and other medical practitioners receive up to 45% of new patients through referral. Though most patients would consider the referral of other doctors, family, and friends, the majority of them will run a Google search of your name and check out your reputation before booking an appointment.
The survey revealed that 60% of patients wouldn’t book an appointment with a medical practitioner that has bad reviews. This is why you should Google yourself now.
By running a quick Google search of yourself, you’ll have a good idea of how your practice looks from a consumer’s perspective and know where to start when creating your digital strategy.
If you unearth some negative results when you Google yourself, try to have the post taken down. But if that doesn’t work, then the best thing you can do is to suppress them with positive content.
Be a source of helpful information
In today’s digital world, most people’s inclination would be to open up a browser in Google and research about their own or their loved one’s condition. With so many people turning to the internet for answers, it is important that healthcare marketing is there to be a helpful and supportive guide.
Regularly post high-quality content that answers people’s questions and help them learn more about medical conditions they may be searching or procedures they may have to undergo. It is also a good idea to share important and relevant medical information to help people improve their health. This will help build your credibility and position yourself as an authority in your field. People may not run off and make an appointment, but you will be in their minds the next time they get sick.
In today’s podcast, I talk about how important it is to have a digital marketing strategy, this is your foundation. We are all busy working inside our businesses and sometimes things get away from us and go to the back burner because they don’t seem like a priority at the moment, like social media, blogging, videos, email marketing, etc.
When you create a strategy it holds you and your team accountable and you are able to work in advance. Imagine this, you take 2- hours per month and plan out that entire month of content, you know exactly what you will be putting out onto social media, what blogs and videos you want to create and you have a plan. This makes your digital marketing process 10 times easier to accomplish but also to utilize your team and delegate to others. Work smarter not harder.
Video of the Podcast:
Here are two examples of content calendars we have created for our clients.
This one is more around your social media strategy. We use Google Sheets and then have tabs for resources, monthly topics, ideas. You can add more to this like your blog topics for the week, this gives you more of a monthly overview.
This one is more of a detailed editorial calendar, each month has its own breakdown of the overarching topic, then blogs, videos, content upgrades, etc. On this one, we have tabs that go into social media and resources.
With both of these examples, you can combine them to have a very clear digital marketing strategy.
If you would like to book your free 30-minute consultation to go over how to put together a clear strategy please schedule your call today!
00:01 Amber Irwin: Hello and welcome to the newest episode of Social Speak Network podcast. I am your host Amber Irwin, and today we are going to be going over the number one tip of your digital marketing: Strategy, strategy, strategy. This is the most important component because this is what gets you organized, and I don’t know about you, but I love to be organized. Having a strategy for your digital marketing allows you that space to create, to be consistent, and to plan your content in advance, rather than that sense of overwhelm, not knowing, “Oh, my gosh, I need to post. What do I need to talk about, what blog is going up? What am I talking about on social media? What have… ”
00:48 AI: And you get a little overwhelmed. Just even saying all those things got me a little overwhelmed. So, having that strategy in place really… It makes you… It holds you accountable and it makes you really think, “Okay, where do I want my digital marketing to go? Who do I want to reach with my social media post, with my blogs, with the ads I’m running?” How do you want it to look? And so by taking responsibility and taking a step back, maybe it’s an hour or two hours per month that you’re putting the strategy together. And in the description below, I will give you a link to two PDF examples of a content calendar because this is really important.
01:36 AI: There are two different ways that we work with our clients. The first thing is that social media strategy. So, sometimes it’s easier to organize your thoughts with social media, and then based on what you’re talking about on social media, it allows you to then create a blog or videos. It kinda creates that foundation. And so sometimes it’s easier to start there and work your way through the rest of the components, rather than just trying to think too big and figure everything out at once.
02:09 AI: So with social media, this is where you need to be consistent. And most of the time, we write our content anywhere… As little as a week in advance, up to three weeks in advance. And with your industry, if you are a health coach, a nutritionist, a massage therapist, there’s a lot of core educational content that isn’t gonna change in two weeks. And those can be those placeholder posts, so you can talk about… Maybe you do an “eat this, not that” post each week. Now, that food is gonna be… There’s not gonna be some new food that comes out next week that you’re gonna have to redo that post. So, you can talk about a “eat this, not that” post. You can talk about like a massage tip, maybe it’s a different type of massage. So, there’s gonna be those educational posts that you can schedule out a month in advance if you wanted to.
03:09 AI: And that’s usually what we do, is we take our content calendar and we schedule it out for that month. Okay. What am I talking about on social media? What topics? And sometimes… Most of the time, we’ll pre-write the posts so they’re ready to go. They’re either scheduled in Facebook or one of the tools, like Buffer or Hootsuite, that we use. Instagram, the images are already made, the content’s there, so we’re just copying and pasting it into Instagram so it’s not taking up, “Oh, my gosh, what hashtags do I need to use? Is this image the right one? Is the formatting right?” You pre-do all of your work, so it’s easy to maintain as you go through. And so having that content calendar, that strategy, allows you to say, “Okay, here is my topics for the month for social media.”
04:00 AI: And if I’m doing… Maybe your segment is on… You’re doing a post of “eat this, not that,” then maybe this is where you can tie in some blogs about, maybe it’s different recipes or how to… If one of our clients is a keto coach. And so she talks a lot about how to cook… With being a keto coach and on the keto path, what are different things, substitutions on food, eating out. And so a lot of her blogs are educational for her audience, tips that they wanna know about. And then she ties in the videos, whether it’s making… Having a recipe that you’re actually cooking or baking, and you’re doing a video around that, maybe it’s you at the grocery store talking about ingredients and showing different things or examples. You can take those ideas of your social media calendar and take them a step further and figuring out, “Okay, what blogs can I do around this? What videos can I implement into those?” And then, “What can I give my audience?” And this is where those content upgrades come in.
05:10 AI: I know it seems like a lot, like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to do that, I have to do this, I have to do this.” But once you have that clear strategy, it really helps lay everything out. And the one thing… Whether you have… Maybe you hire someone to edit your videos, we do a lot of coaching and consulting with digital marketing, so you know, okay, your blog outline, here’s what you need to be talking about in your content upgrade. So figuring out, once you have that big picture, now what? Where do you need help? Do you need help creating images for your social media posts? Do you need help writing the content? Where do you feel are your strengths are at the most, and where do you feel that your weaknesses are, things that you have been putting on your plate. Maybe blogging has been something that you say, “Okay, this needs to happen, it’s just not happening,” and it’s missing in your strategy, maybe that’s where you need help.
06:13 AI: The biggest thing is really… Sometimes it just takes an hour to brain dump and write down, if you had all the time in the world, what would that digital marketing strategy look like? What would you wanna talk about on social media? What would you wanna talk about in your blogs? What are your clients and your customers asking you? That is key right there, is the questions that they’re asking. What are those conversations you’re having with them? That is content right there for you, not to mention maybe even videos, FAQs with them.
06:46 AI: So, starting from the foundation and then building up. You can’t put a roof on a house if there’s no foundation and walls, and you have to think of this marketing strategy just like that. The strategy is the foundation, as you build your social media and your blogging and your lead generation, your email marketing, those are the walls. And then as you start bringing everything together, that’s where you’re gonna have the roof and you’re building this whole digital marketing house, so to speak. And then once everything is set up and it has a rhyme and a reason and a purpose, that’s when you start to see things actually work. Then you can do your Facebook ads. You can do… You can really start to measure what’s working and what’s not working.
07:35 AI: And so, with social media, a lot of… We get asked all the time, “How many times a week should we post? When should we post? What days? What times?” And here’s my answer. It depends on each business because everybody’s audience is different. So again, utilize your current customer base as a huge resource. Ask them, “What time of day are you on Facebook? When do you get your information? Is it early morning right when you wake up? Is it at lunchtime? Is it before dinner time?” Or if you have a lot of moms, maybe it’s like that pick-up line time, so 2:00 to 2:30. Is it an evening, after the kids go to bed, maybe 9, 10 o’clock? So figuring out… And then weekends, a lot of times we post just Monday through Friday because our clientele really isn’t on Facebook and Instagram during the weekends as much. But in your situation, that maybe when they’re on the most. So, it’s really about trial and error.
08:46 AI: And so, using Facebook scheduler, you can schedule your posts on Facebook and trying different times. Maybe it’s Monday mornings at 6:00 AM and Tuesdays at 11:00. And figuring out different times, maybe it’s Wednesdays at 9:00, whatever it may be. And then figuring out what times and days are getting the most engagement. So, are they liking the posts? Are they engaging? Are they asking questions? Figuring out when those posts are getting the most engagement. And the insights on Facebook and on Instagram will tell you those things, and so you wanna make sure you pay attention to those and give that a 30-day span so you know, “Okay, I made a post on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.” I would say if you’re not already posting every day, start with at least three times a week and move your way up. If you’re just starting out and you’re not posting at all, or maybe one time a week, going from one time a week to even five to seven days a week, that’s huge, like, “Oh, my gosh, I have a lot to take on.” So take it in baby steps, but know… And don’t get on everything. Just because there are Twitter and Snapchat and LinkedIn, or whatever, you have to know again where your audience is at. So ask your audience, ask your customers, your clients, “What social media platforms are you on?”
10:19 AI: You could do a SurveyMonkey to ask your audience and email it out. “Hey, we’re really wanting to ramp up our digital marketing strategy, and we need your help so we can best… Give you the best information at the right times and days that work for you. What social media platforms are you on?” Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube. “What days of the week are you on?” Every day, and then list the days. And at what times? Usually, is it early morning, mid-morning, you put times in there. But I would really survey your current audience because they’re already coming to you and so that’s gonna be, again, a huge resource, and you can take that data and then figure out even topics. “What topics are you most interested in? What questions do you have about… ” You know, If you’re a nutritionist, “What questions do you have that we haven’t answered?” And be able to pull from them, and then implement those things into your strategy, because that’s where… If you’re answering their questions and you’re giving them that value that they want to know about, they are 10 times more likely to like, comment and share your posts, and that’s exactly what you want, and then also click back over to your blog, watch your videos, because you’re creating that relationship with them and building that loyalty with them. And so they’re gonna be loyal to you and wanna share your stuff.
11:54 AI: So, it all goes into that strategy, starting up a foundation and working your way from there. So, work on step one, brain dumping, just piling everything down, whether you write it down, you open up a Word doc or a Google Doc and just type down all the topics you wanna talk about, what blogs you would write about, what videos you wanna do, what questions people have asked you, what questions do you wanna ask your audience to put in a survey. And then, as I said, in the end, I will put in two PDF, just examples of two different types of content calendars that we have used and we use with our clients, and work great. And then I’ll also put a link in there to SurveyMonkey, which is a free tool, so that can help you build that foundation and really provide that valuable content.
12:49 AI: So, let us know what questions you have, comments you have, if you’ve been using a strategy and how it’s helped your business. I would love to hear about your experiences or maybe what’s holding you back of creating a strategy. What are those things that are just… It’s hard for you to take that time and sit down and put that strategy in place. We’re here to help you. So again, my name is Amber Irwin. You’ve been listening to the Social Speak Network podcast. Please be sure to subscribe on Podbean or iTunes, and we will have a new episode every week. Enjoy.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Why-it-is-so-important.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2019-08-07 08:00:282019-08-01 14:53:30Why it is so important to have a digital marketing strategy.
In this podcast episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kim Eickhoff, the founder and creator of the SHiFT program.
Kim really stresses how important it is to be present in the moment and to become more aware of your own feelings, patterns, and fears.
Where are they showing up in your life?
When are you feeling sad and why?
When are you feeling frustrated and why?
Taking responsibilities for our own feelings and actions
The one really key point that Kim made was understanding that a lot of these feelings and fears that you have come up from past experiences, whether that be from childhood, young adulthood, things we may not even be aware of on a conscious level.
Now, you may be wondering what does this have to do with business, right? Have you ever felt stuck in your business or feel like you are running in circles? Becoming aware of your fears and how you handle each situation with your clients and colleagues can help you move forward in your business and start creating the life you want.
When we make decisions and take action from a place of fear, or from feeling “less than”, these are not usually the best decisions or actions to take. We have to shift to a place of power, or freedom.
The SHiFT process easily teaches you about your patterns that keep you stuck in the same problems; then how to disrupt those patterns; and finally how to take the right action to move beyond the problems, have better control over yourself and your life, and fully create the life you envision.
Once you learn SHiFT, you can apply it to many challenges in your life and be able to adopt new patterns that put you in the right mindset for growth and success.
00:01 Amber Irwin: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Social Speak Network podcast. I’m your host Amber Irwin and I am so excited for our guest today. Miss Kim, please introduce yourself. Let us know a little bit about who you are, and this is a… I am so excited for this podcast because this is a subject that I’m very passionate about and I know you are as well, so let’s share with our audience a little bit about who you are and what they’re in store for today?
00:29 Kim Eickhoff: Very cool. So, my name is Kim Eickhoff. I have been a business coach for the last 10 years. I love helping entrepreneurs and small business owners learn how to make money doing what they love. I have a lot of clients that are really passionate about what they do, really good at what they do, but they don’t necessarily understand the business side. So, that’s where I come in to just kind of help them with that piece. I also have been a life-long learner of kind of my own personal development, looking at myself, trying to understand why I do what I do [chuckle] and say what I do and get better hopefully at life in general; relationships, business, whatever it is.
01:10 KE: And yeah, I have learned a lot of different tools over the years and so I have now moved my business in a direction of where I still help entrepreneurs a lot, but now I’m also just trying to help people more on a personal development side to become more aware of themselves, what makes them tick, and then how to basically disrupt some of those patterns they get stuck in and make better decisions and create the life they really want versus sort of stuck in a life that they don’t necessarily really want. [chuckle]
01:40 AI: Right. So tell us a little bit about this SHiFT process and why did you create this program?
01:48 KE: So I keep seeing over and over and over again with people, as well as watching myself trying to grow my business, that if I am not working on my own personal issues and I’m not aware of them, that’s what keeps my business stuck or plateaued at a certain level. And as I was seeing this with my clients, a lot of them hadn’t done some personal work and didn’t know about different tools and that sort of thing. So it just kind of dawned on me one day, I have systems to teach them around business so I thought, “What if I had a system to teach them around how to become more aware?” That was fairly simple to learn, can help them see things in a non-judgemental way, so they don’t go into a place of defensiveness or trying to make excuses, but it’s more, “This is really just my reality. This is what I do. This is what I say. This is how I think and feel.”
02:39 KE: And then something that would then help them move out of that. Some tools I could teach them to help them move out of that. So I just started playing with that idea, came up with the idea of SHiFT, started playing with different words that seemed to fit. And then I would say, for the past two years now, it’s evolved slowly and changed a little bit over time to what it is now, to where I think it’s pretty solid. So I’ve been using it consistently for probably the past year the way it is.
03:06 AI: And how do you think that this process has helped you in just your life and business and maybe with your clients as well?
03:15 KE: Well, you know, we’re all human [chuckle] and we all we all get triggered by different things. And what I know for me is I have always been highly emotional. So growing up, I would overreact to stuff. Somebody would say something, it hurt my feelings, or I would get mad about something, I would completely overreact, lash out in a way that was not very helpful, usually. And I mean verbally, not physically, [chuckle] but I would get angry and get mad at somebody, blame somebody else for stuff. And then that never really helped, though. It never really made the situation better. It never really improved or really got me where I wanted to go with whatever that issue was. So for me, what happened was I started practicing this… Well, all the tools I’ve been using over time in various ways.
04:03 KE: Over the last couple of years, once I created it, I started practicing it regularly and I sort of made it my practice when I got triggered about something, something happened, caused a pretty strong emotional reaction, whether it was frustration, or anger, or fear, anxiety, whatever that was, and this could be a cash flow problem in my own business, it could be a cash flow problem with one of my clients because I get worried about them. It could be interactions with people, communication problems, that sort of thing. So not having misunderstandings and getting upset about it, that sort of thing. So I started really using it religiously just to practice it, just to see if it helped. And what I noticed was it the more that I did it, one, I saw really similar themes in how I reacted to certain situations. And so that when it happened the next time, I was much more aware of it and I realized “Oh, I am going into this triggered place.” And when I’m triggered, or somebody is triggered, we don’t usually make the best decisions because our brain goes offline, right?
05:02 KE: Our emotions flood our brain, and so we can’t really make good decisions. So what it does is it helps clear that out so that you can make better decisions. And so, I started practicing it regularly, started seeing the themes, and then at the same time, because I was clearing out all these old emotions, the triggers weren’t as powerful. I wasn’t getting triggered as much in the future. And that was a big… A cool part of it, I thought. Because I was like, “Wow, so now I’m actually releasing a lot of this stuff and what used to really trigger me doesn’t trigger me anymore.”
05:32 AI: Right. You kinda let it roll off your shoulders at this point. You worked through whatever that pattern was.
05:37 KE: Yeah. And the emotions, what I’ve learned is that a lot of these emotions that we have that do kind of come up in these really strong ways, they’re old things. They’re things that happened as kids. Maybe our parents didn’t validate how we felt or we were ignored or whatever, not that parents meant to do these things, but they’re human too and they treat us the way that we probably were raised. And so, we create issues in other people. And so, yeah, when I started to release a lot of that old stuff, because it wasn’t there anymore, the trigger just wasn’t as powerful. And I was like, “Oh that’s really cool, actually. I’m not upset about this anymore.”
06:17 AI: Right, so once you worked that through, like your personal life, how did you see your business grow from letting go of those emotions and not letting those triggers happen anymore?
06:29 KE: Well, so actually, what started me practicing a lot was my business had grown a lot. So I got to this point in my business where I was making more money than I’d ever made, I had a ton of clients, I was really, really busy, but all of a sudden, all this fear was coming up because it felt like, how in the world can I sustain this? Am I really worthy of this kind of stuff? Is this something that I’m gonna be able to keep going with and how do I get to the next level? So all this fear started coming up, and that’s when I started really using shift to work through the fear. What it taught me too was that, yeah, these were old fears that were happening, but at the same time, my intuition was telling me that there are other things I really wanted to be doing and not necessarily what I was just doing so I was just focusing on the business coaching which was fine, but I really felt this desire to move more in this other personal development region as well.
07:29 KE: And I had been pushing that aside because it’s like my intuition kept telling me and I kept shutting it off and I kept… But I’m making money doing this, so why would I change anything? But all this fear, really made me stop and look at that, and when I did, I was like, “Oh.” One, I really wanna get more clear about who I work with ’cause I want clients who really wanna work on this stuff so that helped me see that. And then at the same time, just get clear that this is what I really wanted to be teaching as well as the business coaching.
07:56 AI: Right, yeah, ’cause they go hand-in-hand.
07:58 KE: Right.
08:00 AI: And how have some of your clients that have gone through the SHiFT program, how have their lives and their businesses changed by doing that?
08:08 KE: In lots of different ways. So one client that I have, she’s a photographer and she sells fairly large projects that can range from $10,000-$30,000, so they’re big, bigger size price tags. She would have a lot of fear come up around doing her proposals, because these were big prize tags for her and this was really different SHiFT for her, as far as what she was trying to promote and sell and she just wasn’t ready. A lot of times we’re not emotionally prepared to do something that we know we’re supposed to be doing [chuckle] in our business just ’cause we’ve never done it before, so we have to practice it and get better. So, what I taught her SHiFT and what happened with this was, she would do the process before she actually went into a sales call.
08:54 KE: And so what would trigger her in the middle of the sales call was bringing up the money part. She was able to sort of work through that on the front end and get more comfortable and understand why she was getting triggered and it was all about her own old money stories, really, that’s where she would go with it. And so when she saw that, she learned some tools on how to release that anxiety and those old fears, and then actually just gain more confidence and become more aware that she was worthy of asking for the price that she was asking for. So her business went from… I think the first year we worked together, she sold a couple of projects, so probably $20,000-$30,000 in revenue, around those projects. She did a lot of other things for her business at the time, but she really was moving into this. And this year to this point, I think we’ve sold five, or six already. And so she’s…
09:44 KE: Yeah, she’s really turned a corner with how she presents herself, her confidence and not all that obviously is about SHiFT, but a lot of it helped and she would probably be one of the first ones to say that so. And she uses it now, and she’s in the middle of a meeting, if she starts to feel that anxiety pop up or any of those strong emotions, she knows how to sit there and go through it and feel it and release it and then come back to, “Oh, this is what I’m here to do and this is what I’m confident in,” and then you’re more authentic and you’re more kind of connected, so you’re not just faking it.
10:19 AI: Right. Yeah, and that’s a such an important piece is just being able to notice, when you have that coming up in yourself and not pulling the fingers, but being able to take note and say, “Okay this is what frustrated me,” or, “This is what made me sad,” or… Especially as adults, because you can’t, “You hurt my feelings,” but if you recognize that in yourself, then you can go back and use this practice. So let me ask you this, is this practice easy to learn?
[laughter]
10:52 AI: I mean, we’re talking about a lot here, we’re talking about our emotions. So is this practice easy to learn for everyone?
11:00 KE: It is actually, just because I think that the way it’s broken down. I purposefully made it into a system that is easy to follow. Now what’s hard about it, is to practice it like anything. Like, you can get a gym membership, but if you don’t actually go to the gym, it doesn’t do any good. So, it’s the same idea. You can have tools, but you have to actually use them. But once I lead somebody through it, they’re pretty much on their own from that point, they can always go through it for themselves. The practicing on the back end of the tools that will help you kind of release this stuff and move through it, I find needs a little more hand-holding.
11:37 KE: So what I normally do is I sell this in a few different sessions, like a package, because I teach it to them, they practice it. They come back and see what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and we talk through the tools that they’re using. If they used them correctly, what could they do better that sort of stuff, not, there’s really wrong or right way but… And then we tweak it, and for me, is about me finding what tools work best for different people, ’cause sometimes something might work for somebody that’s super easy. If you’re very aware of your body and how sensations sort of show up in your body, that’s an easy tool to use. For other people, that’s a really brand new concept. They don’t understand that every emotion they have shows up somewhere in their body physically. And that’s a big piece of this process. And so there’s some teaching and training and practicing, that we’ll do around that, but yes, it’s easy to learn. It’s just not easy to practice, necessarily.
12:30 AI: About consistency, stick into it.
12:32 KE: Yeah, totally.
12:34 AI: And so with this… It’s so about your mindset. So you had said that you were focusing on the business coaching, and you were noticing your patterns in changing [12:47] ____ and those emotions, but then, there’s still that fear and that feeling, your intuition was telling you, “This isn’t what you’re supposed to do.” So that shows that money can’t buy happiness in every single way, but that you may think that you’re doing the right thing, but there’s still that fear and listening to your intuition. So is that a big piece of the program, as obviously, you’re looking at where… Like those sensations, how is that fear or anxiety or whatever we wanna label it as, coming up, and then how to deal with it. And that’s what they’re practicing, is how to notice those emotions?
13:25 KE: Yeah. So there’s several components to it, but the main components are your feelings. So if something happens that triggers you, whether it’s making a lot of money, let’s say. So let’s say you have… You made more money in a month than you’ve ever made, you’re excited on one end, but then some fear starts to pop up. It’s just like, “How in the world am I gonna repeat this? Is this possible? Is this sustainable?”, all this stuff. And so, when the anxiety or fear pops up with that, the key you start to look at is the… Are the thoughts that are connected to the feeling. So a lot of times, if the thoughts are about, “I’m not worthy,” about… It’s a lot of deep, deep thoughts. So it’s like, “If I’m not worthy,” or, “If I don’t believe I’m worthy,” these are all beliefs, “to actually make this amount of money and to be successful,” then you will end up sabotaging yourself.
14:13 KE: And that’s how people stay in the pattern, so they’re like, “No, I don’t believe I’m actually worthy, and this is what I’m gonna do to kind of bring myself back down to this amount of money that I feel comfortable at.” So it’s looking at what those thoughts are, and then it’s learning how to challenge those old beliefs and change them, and so the tools around that become one. If it shows up in the body as a sensation, that’s old emotions that are stuck in there, and so you actually have to heal that, and that is about just feeling it. And I don’t mean thinking about it, I mean really feeling it. And this is a process that’s hard for a lot of people, and so I’ll walk them through how to do this and walk them with an issue that they’re having. We’ll actually go through the practice of feeling sensations or as I call it, surrendering to them, ’cause you actually just wanna be present with what’s really happening in the moment and allow it to come up and out.
15:05 KE: And then once the emotions will dissipate, and they always do, you just have to pay attention to them, then those feelings go away. The thoughts go away, and you can actually make some choices on what you wanna do. What I find is, if the fear is showing up over and over and over consistently, and you keep doing this, that’s usually your intuition saying, “Hey, listen, this is not right.” And that’s… ‘Cause fears can mean different things, but that’s… What I’ve learned is like, “Oh, if this keeps showing up all the time, and I keep releasing it, but it keeps showing up, then it’s something deeper trying to tell me something else.”
15:40 AI: Yeah. Oh, I love it.
15:41 S?: [15:41] ____.
15:42 AI: So what is the number one takeaway from this process, and why is it so important in your mind?
15:51 KE: I think the number one takeaway is that we are completely in control of ourselves, and if something happens that… Whether it’s somebody or it’s a situation, somebody says something or does something, and we get angry or frustrated or fearful, all that stuff is our own stuff. It has really nothing to do with what has happened, with what this person has done, with what the situation is. What we do is we take that, and we make it into a much bigger problem, because we’ll ruminate on it, we think about it. I call it “habitual reaction”, so we will constantly think about it and constantly cycle through it, and your body will just get more and more stressed or more [chuckle] and more anxious or whatever it is. But that’s the biggest takeaway to me, is like, “Oh, if I can actually understand what issues of mine are being triggered around this, then I’m in complete control of my life,” because I can actually deal with those, and I can change how I respond to somebody, or what choices that I make.
16:53 KE: If I don’t know what’s happening, and I continue to make other choices, because I’m making choices to get rid of those feelings, I don’t want the feelings, they’re uncomfortable, but if I don’t even know that they’re there because of my stuff, then I’m gonna stay, keep doing things that are gonna keep me in these patterns that aren’t super-healthy for me. And so, becoming aware of that, giving yourself control back, taking full responsibility and ownership of where you are and what your response is, in some way, to me, is huge, ’cause then you’re in the driver’s seat, right? You can make choices, and you can do different things. So that’s, to me, what the coolest part of this is.
17:31 AI: Yeah. Taking responsibility, owning it and making a change. I love it. So tell us how can people work with you? Do you do, obviously, individuals? Do you do group? Do you speak at events? How can people sign up for SHiFT?
17:47 KE: Yes, I do all those things. [chuckle] So I love speaking at events, and I do sort of a 30-minute, big picture overview of what this is, why it’s important, that sort of thing; I don’t necessarily teach it, but I give a lot of information about it. I do one-to-one sessions with people, so I can do them through Zoom, I can do them in person if they’re here in the Denver area. I’m gonna start doing some more kind of group coaching things, but in corporations, that sort of thing, or small businesses. I work… I’d use this a lot with teams, so teaching teams how to do this individually helps them communicate better, because a lot of times people… I mean, you’re interacting with people, so you get triggered by something somebody says on your team, and then all production stops, ’cause you’re mad or whatever, and they’re mad at you, so nobody wants to work anymore.
18:37 KE: Well, this helps you kinda realize that and work through it, so with teams. And then I’m also working on… I wanna do a class, but it would be all video series, so it would be, you get maybe three to five videos in your email, and each one will teach you pieces of it; it’s much more self-directed. Obviously, you do it when you want, but you’ll learn the basic concepts. And with the others, I usually lead you through whatever specific issue you have, in those other programs, so it’s a little more hand-holding, that sort of thing than the other ones, but on the videos it’s like you just learn it, and you do it.
19:15 AI: Okay. And where can I find this information?
19:18 KE: Oh, [chuckle] on my website. What is my website?
19:25 AI: And you’re on Facebook, so they can connect with you on Facebook.
19:28 KE: Yes. Oh yeah, yeah, I’m on Facebook. So Coach Kim Eickhoff, E-I-C-K-H-O-F-F, is my last name. And then…
19:36 AI: And I’ll put the links below in the comments as well.
19:39 KE: Oh okay, cool.
19:40 AI: And then I’ll put your website in there too.
19:42 KE: Okay, coachkimshift.com, so that’s a good place. And then I have a YouTube channel, Kim Eickhoff, if you just put that in there, it should pop up.
19:53 AI: Awesome. Wonderful. Well, I’m so excited. Thank you so much, Kim, for being on with us today. Be sure to subscribe below, everyone. And if you are ready to make some serious changes in your life and take control back, call Kim, and let’s get to work.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Understanding-How-Your-Mindset-Plays-a-Huge-Role-in-Creating-the-Life-You-Want-Blog.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2019-07-30 08:00:462019-07-24 16:40:16Understanding How Your Mindset Plays a Huge Role in Creating the Life You Want
From the moment a patient seeks medical care for an injury or makes an appointment with their family doctor to determine the cause of their recent symptoms, the patient has begun a journey during which multiple people may be involved.
Hospitals, physicians, nurses, and other providers, may all be, at one point or another, involved in this patient journey.
When we start to think of the “Patient Journey” we need to think of these things:
What they are going through?
What are their pain points before they get to you?
What are they experiencing and struggling with?
By identifying these things this helps you as a business owner be able to provide the right resources they are looking for.
In today’s healthcare landscape, consumers have more options, choices, and resources when it comes to the direction of their own care. This ecosystem shift slab that the patient transportation is not a linear one, but rather a multi-stage clause with many different channels and touch points along with the media (much like a tree with dozens of different branches).
A few stages of the “Patient Journey” –
Awareness: Self-assessment of barrier and symptoms, leading to online research and education, consequence problem on social media, etc. This is the start id their journey, they have recognized that something is not right with their body, or how they feel. Most people will become aware of their issue and then start the research process.
This is where they will spend hours online on different tools like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, WedMd, etc. to try to identify what they are going through.
Help: At this point, the patient understands they need help with their symptoms and are looking for the correct place to go. This is where your resource marketing comes into handy because you have been building a rapport with your patients, they trust you and know you are the right person to start with.
Care: This piece is where the “know, like, trust” factor comes in. When a patient chooses you to be their caretaker and help them with their issues or symptoms this is a really big deal. most people just think I am a doctor and this is what I am supposed to do, but you are doing so much more. You are becoming a large resource mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Treatment: You may be on the journey with these patients for a while, or just a couple visits. It’s important to take note of their treatment so you can use that data to help other patients like them. Treatment can be anything from home remedies, physical therapy, chemo, counseling, whether it be large or small treatment it will be a world of difference to your patient if they are no longer in pain.
Behavioral/Lifestyle Change: Changes to reduce readmissions and promote proactive health. How has your care and treatment helped them to live a better life? This piece right here is the end goal, this is what people are looking for.
Do they want to be able to walk with ease again?
Be able to live to see their family grow?
Be able to overcome their fears?
Whatever that lifestyle is for them that they will be able to achieve when they are doing work with you and your practice is the first step to your digital marketing. They are wanting something better in their life, they became aware of their problem, sought help, got treatment, and now ready to live their life again.
Ongoing Care/Proactive Health: What is the call-to-action? Do they need to come for follow-up appointments, exercises at home, home remedies, physical therapy, etc.? What do they need to do to continue their lifestyle and be proactive from here on out?
It’s important for the patient to understand their journey and continue to improve.
WHAT IS PATIENT JOURNEY MAPPING?
Patient route mapping in the healthcare industry is a data-driven, patient-centric approach to planning marketing activity, communications, and (to some degree) even delivery care. It’s a way to gather the facts, discover the anticipation of your patient, and then line-up that information to deliver an exemplary healthcare experience.
What testament a patient excerpt map do for you?
In short, patient section maps give you a clear guide for how to improve retention and acquisition through customer satisfaction. Exceeding patient expectation benefits your saps relation convenience twofold:
It increases retention rates through patient satisfaction
It increases new patient acquisition through evangelism
Word of mouth is still, and most likely always will be the best form of marketing, but if you can really connect with your patient’s on a much deeper level and be able to provide information, be a resource for them and their family. This allows you to take your digital marketing to the next level and reach more people.
Conclusion
Active listening and putting systems in place is key! You will always want a steady flow of patient’s, and as their lives change maybe they move or find a different doctor or maybe your services are no longer needed, it’s important to keep that pipeline full with new and potential patient’s that need your services.
Digital marketing is a great way to connect with a potential patient’s in your community and be more than just a provider, but a resource. Once people feel they can trust your practice and get their questions answered, that’s when the magic happens. They start talking about you online and referring you more and more.
A few things to do when you get a new patient:
Collect their email address – don’t just leave this in your system and not do anything with it, add it to your CRM like MailChimp, InfusionSoft, SalesForce, MyEmma, Constant Contact, etc. an email software so you can send them monthly newsletters with valuable information.
Ask them to like you on Facebook or Instagram
Invite them to leave a positive review on Google and/or Facebook once they are satisfied with their treatment
Then have a strong social media presence to continue to stay top of mind
Remember, you are an important piece of your patient’s journey!
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Copy-of-www.SocialSpeakNetwork.com_.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2019-06-19 09:00:092019-06-18 18:23:06Understanding your patient's journey and How to market to them online
As a healthcare practice, it is really important to stay top of mind with your current patients and also future patients. By using digital marketing there are so many ways to stay connected.
One question we get asked a lot is:
“How do we increase our engagement and promote our practice with digital marketing?”
Well, that answer is a little tricky since there are many different options out there. It’s more of a combination of different tools to make your digital marketing work for you. In the digital marketing world, it is about trial and error, seeing what your audience responds to the most and how to start those conversations.
In this blog, I am going to talk about 5 ways to help increase your engagement and promote your practice.
Word of mouth and referral marketing are still the best ways to grow your practice, but with people being able to access information from SO many places we have to be a little more creative and think outside the box to build those relationships and loyalty.
Once they have come into your practice you want to make sure you stay top of mind, more importantly, you want to make sure you have good online profiles so it is easy for your audience to refer you.
How many of you have wanted to try something new with digital marketing but just don’t know where to start or what to try?
Social media marketing is one of the most popular ways to get in front of your current audience and potential new patients.
You can do this organically or implement paid ads as well. This is not an overnight success, it does take time, but it does work!
Let’s talk about the 5 Ways to Help Increase Your Engagement and Promote Your Practice:
1. Instagram
We have been talking about Instagram a lot this year and we will continue to do so, it is one of the fastest growing social media platforms with the average age 35-65-year-olds. Instagram is all about the visuals, from building a strong brand presence on your feed, having font styles on your images, color scheme, image theme, etc. this makes your feed look clean and interesting. Let’s dive into how to master Instagram Stories
This biggest thing with Instagram right now is the Instagram Stories, these stories only stay up for 24-hours, so this is a great place for:
One really cool thing you can do with these stories is “Highlight” them, this saves them into an area about your feed pictures, you can categorize them so all your stories go to the correct boards. This turns into a great resource for your audience, each video on Instagram Stories can be 15 seconds long, you can record a 45sec to a 1 min long video and then use this app called CutStory and it automatically cuts your video into 15-second increments for you to share.
You can also create branded Instagram stories images with Canva, they have different themes you can choose from, you can use your own font styles, brand colors, logo, and images.
Now, you may be thinking what if I do a video that is more than 1-minute long, where should I put that? Well, don’t worry, Instagram has you covered and that is where IGTV comes into play. This is similar to YouTube but it allows your audience to watch the full video on Instagram, they don’t have to leave the platform.
A few ideas to create IGTV videos around are:
New mother tips
Birthing Plan
Vaccines
Physical Therapy
Counseling Tips
National Observance Days
Surgery Tips
New medical practices
Interviews with nurses and doctors
Instagram has a lot of bells and whistles you are able to tap into and really grow a long-lasting relationship with your audience.
2. Video Marketing
It’s 2019 and it’s all about the videos! Video marketing is huge and will continue to grow. Videos are great because it allows your audience to connect with you quicker. We wrote a blog a few months ago about “How to Create a Strong Video Marketing Strategy” videos are something you either love or hate.
Videos can be educational for your audience, videos with closed captions are even better. Here are a few good stats about video:
Let’s dive into the statistics behind healthcare marketing with video:
About 46% of people say they’d be more likely to seek out information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video. (Source: Eloqua)
Video is now the sixth most popular content marketing tactic,as 70% of B2B marketers use some form of online video with their overall strategies. (Source: Eloqua)
Of the 80% of internet users who watched a video ad, 46% took some sort of action after viewing the ad. (Source: Video Brewery)
The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video. (Source: Mist Media)
Video and e-mail marketing can increase click-through rates by more than 90%.(Source: Mist Media)
Video equals higher viewer retention. The information retained in one minute of online video is equal to about 1.8 million written words. (Source: Brainshark)
Video attracts two to three times as many monthly visitors, doubles their time spent on the site and has a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
Blog posts incorporating video attract three times as many inbound links as blog posts without video. (Source: SEOmoz)
59% of senior executives prefer video over text. (Source: Brainshark)
Having a video on the landing page of your site makes it 53% more likely to show up on page 1 of Google. (Source: Mist Media)
When you think of video marketing, most people think you have to have a studio, pay a professional, take a lot of time on editing, props, backgrounds, and more. In all honesty with the technology of the newer smartphones and HD cameras, you can really shoot your own videos in office. Actually, the more authentic videos are the ones that get the most engagement online.
A couple of things to remember when shooting a video from your smartphones when you are recording a video for Instagram be sure to have your phone vertical, and when shooting a video for YouTube, Blogs, or Facebook you will want your phone horizontal.
Let’s start recording! Be Authentic, real, give value, and have fun!
3. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are climbing higher on the list for digital marketing, gone are the days where just having a Facebook page worked, Facebook pages work great if you plan on spending money on ads.
There are a ton of Facebook groups out there that your practice can join, you can even start your own group.
For example – Let’s say you are a women’s medical office, Your services include OB-GYN, birthing center, primary care, pediatrician, etc. But, one special thing that your office focuses on is wanting to help new mothers with education. Vaccines, breastfeeding, car seats, home care, feeding, etc. Most of your patients come from within a 25-mile radius of your office, you can create a group on Facebook called “Tips for New Mothers YOUR CITY” in this group you can invite your current patients to join, post daily, as your group continues to grow you will post two or three times a day. You are creating a community of women that are going through the same thing and want answers. You can allow the members of the group to post questions and concerns for your practice to answer. This is a wonderful way to create trust with your patients. You can then start to mention the other services your practice offers.
In this video below, I will show you how to start a group from scratch and also how to search for groups to join.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing is NOT dead, I know some may think that email marketing and newsletters are a waste of time, but they actually work great. It is a convenient way to stay top of mind with your patients. With social media marketing and the algorithms it’s hard to really know who has seen your organic posts, then to monitor the engagement. Now, the insights and analytics on the social media platforms tell you how many likes, comments, and shares you had on posts. With email marketing, you can actually see who opened your emails, who read them, and who clicked through to your website.
There are a few ways to incorporate email marketing into your plan:
Content Upgrades, also known as Free downloads. This is a piece of content you put together for your ideal patient to download, in order for them to download it they have to submit their name and email. For example – if we go back to the example in number 3, you could create:
Newborn checklist
Going home checklist
Breastfeeding Tips
New Momma Myths
Top 10 products to have at home for your new baby
etc.
This pdf would then be uploaded to your website and linked into MailChimp or Leadpages to create a landing page with the form for name and email, you can then push this out to social media, your current email list of current patients. Over time you will create quite a few content upgrades. Make a list of different checklists, ebooks, resources you can create for your patients now and then you push that out to gain new email subscriptions to grow your email list. This is an example of what a sign-up form looks like:
Newsletters – You can send weekly or monthly newsletters to your lists, in some cases you may have multiple lists and can customize a newsletter for each list based on your audience. It is important to understand what your audience wants to know about so you can pack your newsletters with valuable content. It doesn’t matter if you do weekly updates or monthly, what matters most is consistency. Whatever you choose to do be sure to stick with it. You can also incorporate your videos into these emails, this allows you to build those deeper relationships!
5. Blogging
Blogging serves dual purposes, it is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and it allows you to show your expertise. When you are promoting your practice on social media your end goal is to get them back to your website to sign-up for your email list, book an appointment, or fill out paperwork, how do you give them an incentive to go back to your website?
When blogging just like everything else we have spoken about it is all about consistency. One blog per month or two, as long as you do one each month, these are no longer 300-500 word blogs, these are cornerstone blogs which means 1500+ words per blog. We recently wrote a blog on how to share your blog, in that post there is a FREE download, a blog checklist, you can download it here.
Your blogs should cover content that your audience wants to learn about, whether this is myths around vaccines, childbirth, new momma tips, etc.
This is where you tie the above 1-4 items into your blogging. In each blog post you will be:
Making an image you can share onto Instagram
Make a “teaser” video for Instagram with 3 inside tips from your blog
Create a longer video for IGTV about your blog
Create videos to go inside your blog post – you will place these videos on YouTube then insert them into your blog posts
Your website/blog is your hub, you want to drive traffic to your hub. Once your blog is complete you can then share it to multiple platforms with links back to your site, this helps reach new potential patients as well.
As you can see through these 5 different marketing platforms, they each allow you to grow your practice and connect with your audience on a deeper level. They all work based on consistency and planning. This is why having a digital marketing plan is so important.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/How-to-Use-Digital-Marketing-to-Grow-your-Healthcare-Practice-Blog.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2019-05-15 08:00:412019-05-14 19:25:06How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow your Healthcare Practice
In today’s world of digital marketing, it is important to stand out from the crowd and really be able to provide your audience value.
Today, we will be discussing the importance of utilizing content upgrades for your business.
These are FREE downloads and added benefits to your blogs that your audience wants.
How it works:
This shows your audience that you are an expert in your industry, by providing valuable content on a topic your audience is already looking for. You are able to connect with them and start building trust with them. It’s about the – Know, Like, Trust factor.
By utilizing Content Upgrades it allows you to grow your email list. Having a strong email list to market to is like gold. This happens because in order for your audience to receive their free content upgrade they need to enter in their name and email. Another key factor to using Content Upgrades is you are able to understand your audience more and really know what they are looking for so you can write more content for them.
Once you have their email address you can remarket to them with future items similar to your content upgrade, this is called the nurturing process, building the trust with them so they will want to do business with you.
So, let’s take this one step at a time and go through the process of what a content upgrade can be and then how to create one.
Content upgrades are the free downloads that you sign up for in exchange for your name and email address. The content upgrades can be a variety of things.
One key place you can look to start thinking of what your content upgrade should be is your FAQ section on your website. This FAQ section gets a TON of SEO benefits from Google, so looking at what your top questions are or event turning those FAQ into a content upgrade.
Here are a few examples of content upgrades.
These upgrades can come in many shapes and forms, but typically include:
Tools and Resources List
Secret Podcast Episode
Checklist of the steps taken in the blog
Regular Checklist
Additional Related Content
Downloadable PSD files or other design assets
One Month Free of your product or membership site
A Printable
Swipe Copy (people love swipe copy, FYI, this is used more for affiliates, content they can copy and paste to promote your product or program)
Transcripts for Audio or Video Recordings
Worksheets to support a blog post
eBook
Case Study
Interactive handout
Video series
You can also think outside the box and include:
15-minute phone calls
Strategy reviews
Free sessions
Etc.
The goal of these upgrades is to increase the number of subscribers on your email list.
All of these items can be used to grab the attention of your target audience. You are creating a valuable piece of content that your audience wants, they then give you their name and email to download this content upgrade.
Now, that you have an idea of WHAT a content upgrade is, it’s time to start planning what you should be creating for yours.
We have a worksheet for you to go along with this blog and to be able to jot down your ideas. Please download your free copy now to continue with this blog. (See how we are using a content upgrade?!?!)
It’s very important to be clear about what you are going to create, and understand that you will have multiple content upgrades. You may do a content upgrade for each blog post, or each service you offer.
For example, if you are a nutritionist and work with clients one on one, you may write a blog and your content upgrade would be a grocery checklist or a food substitute checklist that your audience can download for free then they learn to trust you. Then if you have another blog or maybe even promoting your coaching services you may have a 3-part video series as your content upgrade to help your audience know, like, and trust you along with giving them valuable information within the video series.
Now, that you have figured out your topic and then format you want to create your content upgrade on, it’s time for the fun part!
How to Create Your Content Upgrade
To create your content, you could have a:
PDF: These are great for workbooks, checklists, Guides, etc. Simple tools like Word, Pages, Google Drive Slides, or PowerPoint are all easy to save as PDF’s.
Email Course: These don’t even require PDF’s. In an email course, you are sending valuable information over the course of a few days. This makes it so the recipient isn’t overwhelmed by information and sees your name pop up more frequently. MailChimp allows for automated email sequences, which is a great free way to share this content.
Free consultation: All you need here is your phone. You can use Calendly.com to set time blocks that you are available for consultations to reduce the back and forth.
As subscribers are added to your email list, it is important that you are tagging these individuals with what they were interested in. For us, for example, someone who is interested in information on how to manage their Facebook, won’t be interested in information designed in educating other social media managers. We want to make sure any future emails we send to our list align with the topics they initially were interested in.
Let’s dive a little deeper and talk about how to create each of these things.
1. Use Google Docs or Word to put your thoughts on paper or screen
I love using Google docs because it is a live document and you can use it from any device, it is also great if you have a team that will be working on this project together.
Don’t worry about fonts, colors, visual appeal at this point. It is just about getting the words on the paper at this point.
You can add images and change font later once you have the content complete. Sometimes, I worry too much about the visual appeal at the beginning that I lose focus on the value of the content.
2. Time for the Creative Part – Creating your Cover
Graphics are very important to your content upgrade, they are the main thing that drives the attention of your viewers. We use an awesome tool called Canva, this is where we create the cover image, you can use the 8.5×11
They have Free themes you can edit, add your own font, brand colors, images where you can do one of two things here, you can just create your cover
3. Creating Your Google Doc into PDF
If you choose to use Canva just to create your Cover image then you would download that image to your computer, then head over to your Google Docs and insert that image on the first page.
Then you will want to make sure you have a footer with your contact info:
Company Name
Website
Email Address
Logo
Check to make sure you have the images in the correct areas, the fonts you want and the right brand colors. If you do not have the correct brand color number you can use this FREE Chrome extension ColorPick Eye Dropper, this works to pull the correct color number that then you can add to Google Docs and Canva.
Once that is complete you can go to File > Download As > PDF
Save it to your computer. This saves it in an 8.5×11 PDF.
4. Adding the PDF to your website
You want that PDF to have a URL so you can add it to your sign-up form within MailChimp or Lead Pages.
You can upload this PDF to your WordPress website into the media area, this gives you the URL so you can hyperlink the download within your welcome messages in your sign-up form. We love to use MailChimp because it is free and very simple to use.
5. Bringing it all together
Now, you have everything created and ready to start having people sign up, right?
It’s time to create your landing page and your form so people can start signing up to get your free content upgrade.
Like we said in step 4, we use MailChimp because it is simple and easy to use.
There are other options like using your website or LeadPages as well. In the video below it walks you through the MailChimp process.
Wrapping it all up
I hope from this blog you are able to see the big picture behind these content upgrades/free downloads. There are so many different ways you can tie these into your marketing. One thing I love about content upgrades is it gives that extra oomph to your blogs. I love the creative process of creating a content upgrade.
Have fun with this process and maybe create 2-3 to start and see which one performs better!
Social media networks and search engines can change their algorithms without warning. Email marketing is currently (and historically) the most effective way to continue building trust with prospects, increase recurring revenue, and see an ROI from other marketing efforts. The Social Speak Email Marketing team works with your strategist to build content upgrades, welcome series, and newsletters to stay top of mind.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/How-to-Use-a-Content-Upgrade-to-Grow-Your-Business-and-Email-List-1.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2019-04-12 15:05:152019-04-12 15:05:15How to Use a Content Upgrade to Grow Your Business and Email List
The health and wellness industry has been booming which is amazing! Companies and people are finally taking their health seriously and are looking for reliable resources to guide them and their staff to a more healthier lifestyle. Though that is great, it does mean that we are seeing more and more health and wellness companies pop up. So the question is, how do you become the “go-to” resource for your community?
Networking
Networking within your community is the best way to self-promote, create relationships, and see what your community is looking for in terms of a health and wellness resource. There are many great ways to connect through local networking:
Lunch and Learns– Set up times with local businesses to come in during lunch hours and present on a topic or provide demonstrations. Corporate health has been on the rise and companies are paying more for preventative care now more than ever. With you demonstrating what your services are or presenting on a common health issue that the company may address, the employees and upper management will start to see you as their resource and will most likely come to you for future needs.
Community workshops/events– These are great events to showcase what you offer and what your specialty is. It’s also a way to see what the local needs are in terms of services or topics they are interested in. The more you are seen in your community, answering questions and presenting on topics, the more people will remember you as the health and wellness person.
Webinars– Webinars can connect you to the people in your community who may not have the option to meet you one on one or attend an event you are at. They are can download the webinar and watch it when it’s convenient for them so you can reach a larger population and they can refer back to it anytime. Another great thing about webinars is that you can link them to your site and social media pages from the video to help drive traffic to your sites right away.
Content Upgrades
Content upgrades can give your local community a sample of what you offer. These can work for multiple types of health businesses from health coaches to clinics through different types of content upgrades:
Resource Guide to your Niche- This guide can show off some of the services you offer by offering information or a go-to guide on specific topics. People can download it and have material that will drive traffic back to your site for more information.
Cheatsheets, Challenges, and Checklists, Oh my! – All of these are great action-based materials. That means it gives your community something to follow up with or physically try. Challenges get people motivated, excited, and talking about your content and business. Checklists can be referenced over and over again. They are also easily updated to accommodate multiple topics. And who doesn’t like a cheat sheet that can help make their health journey a tad bit easier? Add items such any numbers, conversions, quick reference points for a health topic, etc.
Free Trial– Get people using your services with a trial run. This can give them a snapshot of what you do in your business and can spark interest.
Case Study– For more clinical businesses or businesses that want to show scientific benefits, case studies can be used as content upgrades. They give your community facts about the types of services you are offering, but, always make sure that you site the case study and check that it’s from a reputable source.
Social Media Content
We are living in a social media time. Most people, once they meet you, will look you up on social media. The content you post can have a huge impact on their impression of you and your business. Create an engaging and education-heavy environment through your media content:
Engaging Instagram stories– Using Instagram and Instagram stories can be an amazing way to engage your community. You can utilize IG Stories to post personal messages, ask questions, and create a buildup to an event. Followers can comment on your stories or you can respond in real-time when doing a Q&A session. To see how to use IG Stories more in depth, check out our previous blog: Using Instagram Story Tools to Engage your Viewers
Tagging other Resources– A great resource knows other resources in the area and since we can’t be an expert on everything, we need to work on gaining other reliable resources. You can tag them and lead your followers to other reputable resources in the area which builds relationships with residents as well as local businesses.
Videos to showcase your specialty– Social media videos can connect you with your followers through your work. You can post demos of what you do, testimonials of successful past customers, or anything that aligns with your specialty and what you are trying to accomplish through your business.
Professional Networking
Building relationships through community events is very beneficial but there is a whole other community you may be missing- the professional networking community. Corporate health and reaching the working community can open other doors for your business. There are also really fun ways to network with local businesses:
Trade Shows– These events can give you an insight into what the needs may be based on questions asked. It’s also an opportunity for you to meet locals and other business owners and while building relationships.
Hosting a Lecture Series– Hosting a lecture series for local businesses can give you a way to present what your business can offer their employees and why you should be their contact for all things health related. By setting up a series, you can display what you offer and continue to bring in new topics of interest when you come back. As a health resource, people will probably have many questions so following up the series with a Q&A can have a great impact on how you are received as an expert in your field.
Industry Happy Hours– These are fun ways to get business owners out in the town and be able to connect outside of work. These are great events to build relationships, see what the needs of businesses are, and have a little fun while doing it. They are low-pressure but be sure to have business cards or samples of what you do.
Join Organizations– By joining local organizations, you are showing the neighborhood that you are invested in the community and care about what happens in it. You will also get opportunities to be more involved in the local events. The more you can get out into the neighborhood, the more people will get to know your face and what your business stands for.
These are just some of the ways to that you can build up relationships, get involved in your community, and support the local people in their health journey. Relate to where your business is and fulfill a need. Once people start to see you around more, see that you are invested in the community, and see your passion/knowledge of what you do, you will start to become the first person they think of when they think of health topics.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/How-to-be-the-Go-To-Health_Wellness-resource-for-your-local-audience.png315560Amanda Andersonhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmanda Anderson2019-04-02 17:13:422019-04-02 17:13:42How to be the Go-To Health/Wellness resource for your local audience
Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms and it is so important for your business to be utilizing this amazing tool!
In this blog, we will help you understand Instagram and how to master it for your business!
We will cover the following:
What Makes a Good Post
Hashtags
Strategy
Tools
Stories
About Instagram
Instagram is a social networking platform made for sharing photos and videos, you can only upload content from your smartphone or a third-party application. You can edit your profile, follow, and research via your computer, but cannot post.
Facebook owns Instagram, so, you will see some similarities. You have your profile and news feed, you can have multiple accounts, most people have a personal account and a business account.
When you post a photo or video on Instagram, it will be displayed on your profile. Your followers will then be able to see your post in their newsfeed. This also is the same for people you follow, you will be able to see their posts within your newsfeed similar to Facebook.
Instagram has a strong emphasis on mobile and visual sharing, a few things to point out with your Instagram account, links to websites do not work within the content area of the posts, most people will have a link to their website in their bio and tell their audience within the content to click on link in bio.
Instagram is all about building authentic followers and great for increasing engagement with your audience.
Let’s talk about what makes a good Instagram post and some guidelines to follow.
Instagram Posts
Now, that you have your business Instagram account all set up and you are ready to post, it is important to think about what makes a good Instagram post.
There are a few variables that go into a great Instagram account.
Here are 8 things to think of before you start posting:
1) Audience – You want to know who your target audience is and what they like. You will want to make sure you are giving them value in each post.
2) Length of post- With being able to have 2,200 characters to craft together just one Instagram post, that is a whole blog post if you think about it. When crafting together each Instagram post you want to think of the outcome for each post, you can share a blog on one Instagram post or full recipe and you will want to try shorter posts and longer posts to see what your audience prefers.
3) Call to Action – What is the outcome or goal for each Instagram post? Are you giving a tip, valuable content, asking a question and looking for sign-ups, wanting people to sign up for a product or service? What do these Call to Actions mean? Likes, comments, tags, shares, etc? You need to be clear about what those CTA (Call to Action) should be, they can be different for each post.
4) Hashtags – This is a little bit of trial and error, meaning do some research on http://hashtagify.me/ to find out the most popular hashtags that are going to be beneficial for your brand. Instagram also has an amazing internal hashtag research tool, if you open up Instagram and click on the search icon you can put in a #hashtag and see how many times it has been used. Some people say use your hashtags in your content of the post and some say put your hashtags in as a comment. We recommend both. Here’s why, if you put them in the content are people will be able to see the important words/ hashtags, then also utilize the comment area to add more, up to 30 if you would like.
5) Tag fellow followers – This is a great opportunity to gain more exposure. You want to find people that are in your tribe, power partners, cheerleaders, etc. On certain posts, you can tag your tribe for their followers to see and then in return, this helps grow your followers and helps your tribe grow theirs. It’s all about collaboration!
6) Brand – Instagram is a great platform to really allow you to show your brand. You can create images through Canva with your brand colors, fonts, and styles to make sure each image showcases your brand. A well branded Instagram account has a good flow and the images align together.
7) Schedule – When are you posting? When is it the best time for your audience to see your posts? Well, you may be surprised. According to Later the best times to post on Instagram by day of the week are:
8) Grammar – Instagram is just as important as any other social media platform, and since you are posting as your business grammar is important to pay attention to. I have found prewriting my Instagram posts either on a word doc, Google Doc or in an email, allows me to make sure I am not misspelling words and have correct punctuation. I found a tool called Grammarly this checks grammar, punctuation, and spelling. This tools has been a huge help for myself and our team!
What is a Hashtag?
An Instagram hashtag is a word or phrase comprised of letters, numbers, and/or emoji preceded by what was once referred to as the pound symbol (#). Instagram hashtags categorize content. Click on a hashtag and you’ll be able to browse posts that have been tagged with it. Attach one to your own photo or video and it will be discoverable to anyone searching the hashtag. How likely it is to be seen by other users depends on how often the hashtag is used, how popular your post is (does it already have a lot of likes and comments?), and how strong your following is. Hootsuite has a great guide to download detailing what an Instagram Hashtag is, click here to read more.
When and How to use a #Hashtag
• When you are talking about a hot topic like a keyword, example #SocialMediaTips #SocialMediaMarketing things that people are looking for.
• Look at the #Hashtags your competitors are using
• Look at what industry influencers and what #Hashtags they are using
• Anytime you post to Instagram you want to use between 3 and 30 per post
• You can insert your #Hashtags in the body of your content or also as a comment on your post
• Create brand #Hashtags #SocialSpeak #SocialSpeakNetwork
• Instagram now allows you to follow hashtags so you can keep up on the trends!
• BONUS Tip: Great tool to find #Hashtags check out Hashtagify
Three Questions to Think of:
1) What type of content do you want to share on Instagram?
What are your goals for your business Instagram account?
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2) Who is your target audience? Are they on Instagram?
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3) How will you integrate Instagram with your overall marketing plan? Are you going to promote products, workshops, events, services, tips etc?
When thinking of your strategy and goals, here are some things you want to think of:
Increased brand awareness
Show your company personality and team
Increase customer engagement and loyalty
Showcase products and services
Promote events or workshops
Share company or industry news
Build a more engaged community
Connect with influencers
Drive sales through traffic to website
Tools for Instagram
The tools are improving all the time for Instagram, the best way to post your content is manually through your tablet or mobile. There are third-party apps like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Later that you can put your posts into their system and then it will give you a push notification on your device when it is time to post to Instagram. This helps you schedule your posts out and easily post them to your account.
Here are a few tools we have found to make the Instagram strategy easier:
Trello – This lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. Trello’s boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding way. You can create your posts in Trello for Instagram, upload your image and content using bullet points, emojis and spacing, the formatting will stay the same when you copy and paste it to Instagram.
Canva – Easily create beautiful designs + documents. Use Canvas drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to design
consistently stunning graphics. Design eye-grabbing social media graphics, and more with thousands of beautiful layouts. In Canva you can also add your brand fonts and colors.
Buffer – Buffer for Instagram The easiest way to plan, track, and amplify your Instagram marketing. While Buffer can’t do the posting for you, we’re here at every step. As you may know, Instagram does not allow outside apps to post directly to Instagram. With Buffer’s Instagram support, you can create an Instagram reminder in the web or mobile app, and when it’s time to post, Buffer will send a notification to your phone that loads your photo into Instagram with your prewritten caption saved to your phone’s clipboard, ready to be pasted.
Hootsuite -Now you can schedule your Instagram posts and engage your followers with Hootsuite. Hootsuite lets you do more with Instagram. Schedule your Instagram posts Save time—and keep your social presence active—by easily scheduling your Instagram posts in advance. Monitor your brand, your competitors, and keywords to get the full picture of your space. Share the workload and have your Team Members post photos and reply to comments. Use a single dashboard Schedule and publish content directly to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all at once, and engage with your followers across your social networks.
Later – Plan all your visual content from photos to videos Organize weekly and monthly visual content at a glance across social channels. Plan in calendar view Preview posts as they’ll actually appear. Schedule across platforms Queue up Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Optimize your workflow with Media library, Sync up from your computer, Drive & Dropbox. Organize all your media with labels and keep them all – Bulk upload to save time, Sync photos and videos from a desktop, Drive, or Dropbox. Label & organize your media, index visual gems for future reference with Labels. Work like a dream team brings creative minds together in Groups.
LinkTree – Linktree is a free tool for optimizing your Instagram traffic, whether you’re a blogger, an artist or run a content platform. You’ll get one bio link to house all the content you’re driving followers too. Let your content live longer than the feed.
Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories is a feature that lets users post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours.
Here are 4 tips for great Instagram Stories:
1) Special Offers – Create a special offer just for your Instagram audience. If you have a special service or event you can create a code for a discount that ONLY your Instagram followers will be able to get and that offer will ONLY last for 24 hours. You can post a coupon or a teaser image to get the hype up before you post your story with some of the details, then give the code or discount in the Instagram Story video! Remember to give a direct link where they can redeem that discount!
2) Highlight a Creative Process – Show something in the process, maybe design, sketch, graphics, product. People LOVE to see how things are being made. If you are a home stager you can show before and after, decluttering. If you make jewelry you can show the creative process of how your items are made. This can also include a sneak peek to new items or new services.
3) Behind the Scenes – Since Instagram stories are temporary this is a great opportunity to show behind the scenes. Helping out in the community, setting up events, interviewing customers, giving tips on different processes that help you. Bringing that human feel to your brand. Similar to #2 as in highlighting something, but this type of video would be more focused around you as a business owner.
4) Instagram takeover – This is something you would do later on in the game, once you have developed a strong following and a good group of power partners. Instagram story takeovers are quick and easy, also a fun way to grow your followers. You exchange login information with a power partner or someone that can compliment your business and you do an Instagram story from their account! It lasts for a 24 hour period, the videos only stay up for 24 hours as well. This draws special attention from your followers. It shows your partnerships with other businesses and helps build that support and community.
Tip: When putting together an Instagram Story make sure you are adding VALUE! You can also add in #Hashtags, Links, Stickers and more! Have FUN with it!
Time to get started! Just remember these things:
1. Take advantage of free Instagram tools we mentioned in this ebook.
2. Cross promote Instagram posts as much as possible.
3. Keep your audience in mind when posting, you don’t want to overwhelm them.
4. Engage with your followers, like and comment on others posts also take time to share posts.
5. Use Hashtags
As you can see there is a lot to managing your Instagram account, it’s all about being clear and consistent. This platform is great to build authentic relationships and really grow your sales funnel.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/How-to-Master-Instagram-for-your-Business.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2019-03-25 20:32:542019-03-25 20:32:54How to Master Instagram for your Business
How many of us spend more than an hour per month planning content for our social media platforms?
If you are anything like me or I should say how I was in the past 😉 I had all these great ideas and topics I wanted to talk about, pictures I would want to stage, videos I wanted to shoot, blogs I wanted to write, the list goes on, and then I would get caught up in work & life! Yep, and forget to implement all these awesome ideas.
In today’s day and age, it is so important for your business to have a clear and consistent plan with social media. As we all know social media is always changing or adjusting something if you don’t have a clear plan it is easy to get lost in mess.
It’s easy to say you are going to block time and put together your strategy for the year, but honestly, does that happen?
Each year I love to check out what the social media trends are going to be for the new year, and what the experts think will change, or what will be needed. We then as a team take that advice or tips and implement them it into our own marketing strategy.
But, did you get into business to follow social media trends? I don’t think so, that’s why you are here reading this blog now!
Your social media content strategy is something that does take time to plan, I am not saying it is going to be easy or happen in an hour, it does take a little leg work up front to really dive deep into your brand/business to identify which direction you need to go in. Listening to your audience, monitoring insights, analytics, and talking to your customers and/or clients.
Each social media platform has its own personality and your audience will engage with you differently on each platform. So it’s important to look at each platform as its own entity and create a content strategy around that platform. Now, some content will be able to go across multiple platforms, but if you do that, put that content out on different days.
I am not a huge fan of the same post going out at the same time to Facebook, Instagram, Linked, and Twitter you see it 4 times and that doesn’t give your audience any true value.
If you are sharing a blog post create a few different posts that you can put out to the social media platforms.
Before we dive into the 4 ways to create a strong social media content strategy, I wanted to talk a little bit about blogging and how that feeds into your social media content. This is a piece that is often overlooked, below we talk about setting goals, one area is building website traffic. If you are not blogging about valuable content on your website, what entices people to want to click over to your site?
We have put together a FREE Blog Sharing Checklist that you will also be able to implement into your social media content strategy.
So, let’s get started, today, we will be covering 4 areas to create a clear and consistent content strategy for your social media.
Let’s start with Goal setting
When it comes time to create your goals for your social media, you can think of SMART goals
SMART is an acronym for:
Specific: Your goals should be clear, simple and defined.
Measurable: This is where analytics come in. You want a goal that has one or more metrics.
Achievable: Is it achievable or is it not possible within your resources?
Realistic: With your current resources of time and money, is it possible to achieve your goals?
Time-sensitive: Every goal needs a time frame, whether it’s one year or several months.
We recommend you look at monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. You want to think of these different areas:
Brand awareness – with over a billion people on social media daily, yes daily, you can check those stats here, it can be a little difficult to stand out from the crowd. Looking at social media to help build brand awareness is a great idea. There are a few components to building brand awareness that we want to think about when writing down our goals.
New Leads – When it comes to social media people are always looking for the ROI, the key factor is what does ROI mean to you and your business? New leads can be new email signups, new clients, people that are looking at your shopping cart, subscribed to a content upgrade, or even blog followers. This is where the SMART goal setting comes into play, it’s important to be very clear on what the new leads mean to you.
Traffic to the website – This is a piece I love to monitor each month, it’s amazing how much traffic we get from our social media platforms. If you have Google Analytics on your website it monitors the traffic sources so you can see where people are coming to your website from. When it comes to setting a goal for website traffic, it helps to use % like I want my website traffic to grow by 35% of views coming from just social media platforms, or I want my website traffic to increase by 50% from sharing my blog posts to Pinterest etc.
Building community and brand authenticity – This is a big trend for social media right now, and I shouldn’t call it a trend but more of a value. It has been brought to the attention of business owners and brands all over that people/your audience want to know WHO you are. What your business or brand stands for, being a transparent and authentic business or brand allows you to create a loyal community. At the end of the day, our social media platforms are our online communities. I always think of social media as an online networking event. It takes time to build relationships and it’s a two-way street. You need to engage with your audience, ask questions, active listening, and much more to build this community. What does an authentic business or brand look like for you? How would a strong and loyal online community benefit you?
Content Strategy
Now, that you have your goals defined, it’s time to put the content together that your audience is looking for. With social media platforms saturated with all different types of content and updating less than every second, it can make it difficult to stick out from the crowd.
You want to give your audience value, content that leaves them wanting more, you are the expert in your industry and people want to do business with YOU!
How do you create a clear content strategy?
We must first define your brand’s voice:
Look at your company’s core values
What important to you?
What is your demographic, and how do they speak?
Then we can move into how to bring that voice into storytelling, let’s be real, people love stories! Every good business and brand has a good story behind it!
Humanize your brand
Share stories about your brand
Work on connecting with your audience on a deeper level
Share relevant content that relates back to your core values and brand
Now, we dive into keyword research and finding the pain points of your target audience. Finding out this information is NOT to create a bait and switch strategy, but again, to really connect with your audience on a deeper level and find out where their struggles are at so you can create valuable content around their needs.
Here are a few tools to help with keyword research:
How to find your audience’s pain points for you to solve:
Ask your current customers/clients
Create a survey and send to your email list
Ask your social media followers
You always want to have a good mix for your social media content strategy and being consistent. It’s great if you take the time to craft together this amazing post that gets a TON of engagement and then you post NOTHING for over a week, that one badass post serves NO purpose now.
Going back to the point I made earlier, keep your audience wanting more!
Types of content you want to create
You can do this by getting creative with your content.
1- Blog posts
2- Products
3- Videos
4- Company personality
5- Curated content or industry news
6- Gifs
7- Events or networking events
8- Original photos
9- Testimonials
10- FAQ
11- Content upgrades or free resources
12- Podcast or books
13- Company milestones
14- Inspirational quotes
15- Fan content
16- Infographics
17 – Employee/Owner stories
18- Power/Referral partners
19- Product reviews
20- National observances days, Nation # day, National Awareness day
I love getting creative and providing our audience with awesome content that they can implement into their business.
Content Calendar – bringing it all together
The fun part is creating the content, thinking of all the different topics, ideas, videos, pictures, etc you want to use for your social media strategy. The hard part is being consistent and having a plan. As you can see this is a process and it takes time.
Take some time and find a system that works for you, there are plenty of tools out there that we have used and recommend to help you and your team stay on the same page.
When I started on this blog I did a little research to a few bloggers/influencers to see where their struggles were with digital marketing and how they have overcome them.
I asked these 3 questions:
1) What are the top 3 struggles you have faced with your digital marketing strategy?
2) How have you found Social Media and Blogging to help your business?
3) Where do you feel you need to most support with your marketing on a monthly basis?
Our Responses:
Fit Bottomed Girls said the top 3 struggles they have faced in the digital marketing world have been – Getting through the digital noise and clutter, Defining a clear budget for marketing, and Converting readers to customers of our own products.
Since their business IS blogging social media and blogging play the most important role in their business, it has allowed them to establish a brand, a community, a voice, and a platform!
Tabitha Blue with Fresh Mommy Blog said her top 3 struggles she has faced in digital marketing is time – making the time for everything, putting all the ideas together and keeping it consistent, Once she writes the blog post, now what with writing captions for sharing blog posts to social – eye-grabbing and appealing that makes people want to click through to full blog, and lastly figuring out the right topics people want to learn about.
Again, this is a lifestyle blogger and her business revolves around her and the brand she has created. She has been able to empower mothers all over the world with her content.
Where she said she could use the most support was creating systems for sharing blog posts, best times and days to post along with having a consistent social media strategy. This is her happy place where motherhood, food, travel, design, and stylish little things collide. Tabitha is a certified life coach, mom of four and she wants to empower busy women + moms to feel organized to do more of what they love… and feel confident to do it in style! Website: https://freshmommyblog.com/ Email: hello@freshmommyblog.com
Dee Gautham Fitness said her top struggles with digital marketing are finding the balance between personal and business, writing posts around self-expression and still giving the reader enough value, writing purposeful content, and optimizing for revenue vs. followers and what’s that sweet spot.
Dee is a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, Nutritionist, Online Coach, published author, and speaker on women’s body image and self-confidence expert, she works with her clients in a group setting or one on one. She has found that Instagram has been the most beneficial to her brand and building brand awareness, really being able to connect and engage with her audience. She is only blogging twice per month but feels that is something that will grow as she grows more.
Where she said she needed the most support is having a consistent strategy with social media and blogging, self-expression and sales. The mission of Dee Gautham Fitness is to help women get in the best shape of their lives – physically AND mentally – so you can feel, look, and perform your best, and reach your highest potential in this world. https://deegautham.com/
In conclusion, you can see there is a theme about taking time to create the right content strategy and staying consistent with it. Once you do the leg work, in the beginning, it is easy to add more to it and adjust each quarter.
Don’t overwhelm yourself with trying to do a whole year at once, but work on a quarterly basis. Ask yourself, is it time to regain control of your marketing? We have the solution for you!
Often marketing managers and business owners feel as though the content they are creating doesn’t drive the business towards a set goal.
Content is created in a haphazard manner and there isn’t enough accountability or guidance to make sure each aspect of a digital marketing plan is as effective and efficient as possible.
We’re experts in content creation, SEO, email marketing, sales funnels, WordPress development, and social media. We also have exclusive access to new cutting-edge resources and trends in digital marketing.
Our clients rest easy knowing that their marketing efforts are being handled in the most efficient and effective ways possible for their business. With monthly accountability coaching and quarterly content calendars, we help you to make sure your entire team is following best practices and has access to training materials and tutorials.
Would you like to set up a FREE 30-minute consultation to learn more about this solution for your business or to see what pointers we can give you on your strategy?
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/What-Makes-a-Strong-Social-Media-Content-Strategy_.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2019-03-12 17:14:572019-03-12 17:20:25What Makes a Strong Social Media Content Strategy?
Instagram is by far my favorite social media outlet. I shamelessly could sit there for hours following tags, searching for new wellness accounts to follow, and seeing what people are up to. But the thing that always grabs my attention are the Instagram Stories. To me, they are by far the most engaging and intriguing part of Instagram.
Instagram Stories are a huge viewer engagement opportunity. They add a personal level that truly grabs your followers’ attention.
Involving your Audience
There are so many tools you can use on Instagram Stories to make your audience feel like they are a part of your journey or your daily life. Here are the top engaging tools that you can use to engage your viewers:
Poll
Ask me a Question
Countdowns
Swipe Up
Each of these tools either ask for an action step from your followers such as responding with a question of their own or giving you their opinion, or they encourage your followers to check back for the post/event that the countdown was for.
Poll
Poll is by far, my personal favorite when following stories. It gives me a chance to feel involved in the person’s post. Polls are great for hearing what your viewers want to see. Use polls to give options to them and see what they are interested in listening to. This will encourage them to continue following you and checking in for the content they feel they had a say in. As health professionals, there are so many topics to talk about so see what information is being asked for.
Ask a Question
This is a great tool for health and wellness companies. Most people that are interested in health have questions and if they are following you, they are interested in what you have to say. A trend right now for fitness/health professionals is a Q&A session via IG Stories using the “ask a question” feature. Set up a time to have your followers ask questions, post their questions in your stories and address their questions during the videos. This involves the person asking the question and gives your viewers answers to questions they may have as well. During these sessions, utilize hashtags and tags to increase engagement and give the viewers something to follow up on after your session is complete. You can also create the label for the question meaning you can dictate what direction you want the questions to go. This will keep the conversation and videos you make focused on your specialties.
Countdowns
The Countdown feature can be great for creating excitement for an upcoming event, product release, or follow up post. Blogs are great to use countdowns for as well. It creates a buzz about your content and with the help of another feature (see below), you can have the follow up post lead directly to your blog.
Swipe Up
This can be one of the most useful and easy features in terms of marketing. The Swipe Up feature is used to take a viewer directly to a site that you would like them to see. You can increase website traffic, send your viewers directly to a post you want to highlight, or for healthcare professionals, send viewers to a scheduling system to get started utilizing your business. Consumers want easy ways to find information and we love social media. The Swipe Up feature address both of these aspects. Please note that to utilize the “Swipe Up” feature, you must have a minimum number of 10,000 on your business account.
Using Stories to Increase Website Traffic
By utilizing these features, you engage your viewers, give them a voice, provide information, and direct them to the next step. These features create an interactive environment and spike curiosity in your business. It may start just as another Instagram account for them to follow, but, if you keep providing top information that is sought after and provide an engaging environment, those followers may become future clients.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/How-to-Use-Instagram-Stories-to-Engage-your-Health-Minded-Followers-1.png800800Amanda Andersonhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmanda Anderson2019-02-19 08:00:062019-02-19 21:21:12Using Instagram Story Tools to Engage your Viewers
Jennipher Walters CEO/Co-founder, Fit Bottomed World LLC 
This is her happy place where motherhood, food, travel, design, and stylish little things collide. Tabitha is a certified life coach, mom of four and she wants to empower busy women + moms to feel organized to do more of what they love… and feel confident to do it in style! Website: https://freshmommyblog.com/ Email: 
The mission of Dee Gautham Fitness is to help women get in the best shape of their lives – physically AND mentally – so you can feel, look, and perform your best, and reach your highest potential in this world. https://deegautham.com/
