To Print or Not to Print? That is the Hospital e-Newsletter Question

If you are a member of Professional Healthcare Marketers group at LinkedIn, this may seem like déjà vu to you. That is because the other week, a thread developed around a group member’s question about the effectiveness of print vs. e-newsletters for hospitals.

Exciting, dynamic electronic media or boring, static and outdated print media: Which do you think is the more optimal medium for your newsletter?

Although she was primarily interested in finding studies that supported one or the other (none of which seem to exist, by the way), the basic “print vs. electronic” question is still quite valid and compelling.

From my perspective as an online healthcare marketing content specialist that has developed many newsletters over the years (both print and electronic), I have no doubt that electronic newsletters are not only more effective, but also more economical and efficient. Here are several reasons why:

• Less cost: With e-newsletters, there are no fees for printing, postage, etc.

This also translates into being able to publish virtually unlimited “copies,” and thus, an ability to connect with a virtually unlimited number of subscribers at no extra marginal cost.

• Trackable user data: If you use  e-newsletter distribution services such as MailChimp and Constant Contract, you can analyze valuable analytics and metrics.

Who read what? Who opened what? Who even received the newsletter? These and many other questions can be asked—and answered—with an e-newsletter.

• Viral sharing and networking building: Your subscribers can more easily share the content with others—including non-subscribers. Not only does this potentially expand the scope of your content, but it can also result in additional subscribers…that can translate into additional customers!

• Multimedia and interactivity: Unlike print, an online newsletter enables you to include video, links to online and real-time polls, your blog, etc.

• Reduced barriers/steps for online calls to action: Website and e-mail calls-to-action can be immediately clicked, rather than hoping that a print newsletter subscriber has immediate access to a comuter or will remember to go online later.

• SEO: If the newsletter’s content is meant for public consumption, publishing that content online can mean additional organic traffic to your Website.

• Reduced decay: A print newsletter’s information has a limited lifespan. After it is read (which, as mentioned, you’ll never know for certain), the document is discarded, ignored, thrown away, etc.

An online newsletter, however, can extend its life—and value—by being electronically archived, indexed and searched.

What do you think? Are there compelling arguments in defense of print…or perhaps a combination of print and electronic newsletters? What other reasons support e-newsletters over print?

AVID Design can design your hospital’s e-newsletter and integrate it into your overall online healthcare marketing strategy. Contact us today to learn more.

Add to Technorati Favorites

March 8th, 2010

Posted in Analytics and Metrics, Marketing, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

How to Manage Secure Hospital Social Media Passwords

Last month, the headlines about the latest large-scale Twitter account hacking was exactly the kind of news that frightens many—especially skittish hospital executives and stakeholders—from engaging with social media for their hospital or healthcare system.

How well do you manage the keys—passwords—to your hospitals’ online security, such as with your social media accounts?

After all, if one person can’t protect his or her personal accounts, how can a hospital be expected to have multiple social media users and accounts without exponentially increasing their risk for being hacked?

Use Multiple, Secure Passwords

The most common mistake people make with passwords—especially when they are sharing those passwords—is that they want them easy to share and remember. For instance, they do things like create passwords that are just the hospital’s name—or they try to get crafty by adding “123” to that name. Worse, they’ll use that password for multiple accounts.

Remember, the easier a password is to remember or share, the easier it is to hack. That is why you want a password that is not only challenging to remember, but a password that doesn’t even resemble a word.

It’s very easy to make a secure password that will deflect hackers: Just Google “password generator” and you’ll discover dozens of Websites that will automatically generate random, unique and secure passwords for you.

Aim for passwords that use combinations of letters and numbers, especially since most social media passwords don’t recognize non-alphanumeric characters.

Change Passwords Regularly

The longer you use a password, the more likely is can be hacked.

Don’t wait for your password to get stale; update it as frequently as you need to be comfortable. Just make sure that everybody that uses the password is aware of your schedule!

Know Who Has the Passwords

There are countless reasons for why this is important, starting with knowing whom to advise if you regularly change—or have the occasion to abruptly change—your password.

Likewise, if an authorized user should happen to stop working at your hospital—or for any other reason why they are no longer authorized the account—you’ll not only need to change your password, but also need to know whom to update.

Educate Your Administrators

Finally, for dispersed authorship accounts such as a WordPress blog or CMS that enables multiple authors with their own login information, remember that like a chain, your security is only as strong as its weakest link.

That means your security is largely based on the strength of your weakest password. Therefore, it’s critical that you educate you administrators about the value of using smart and secure password management tactics.

Have you ever been hacked? What is for a personal or professional account? How do you manage your hospitals’ logins and passwords?

AVID Design offers integrated social media consulting and strategy for hospital and healthcare systems.

Add to Technorati Favorites

March 5th, 2010

Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

The Case of Hospital Website Monitoring and Spamming

Many hospital and healthcare systems look for new ways to reach out to their patients and the community. Sometimes they implement new and possibly non-traditional hospital and healthcare strategies to reach those in their community who may not be familiar with them, or are newcomers to the area.

Spam is not good... for hospitals OR to eat!

A hospital client of ours recently started a service to welcome newcomers to the area.  This service allowed new people to sign up on their Website for free items–area maps and an environmentally-friendly shopping bag–from the hospital, as well as allowed them to register for things, like a gas card.  Things were going well until they noticed that all of a sudden many of the requests were from around the country and NOT their target area.

Hospital Website Monitoring = Good; Spamming = Bad

The client was, luckily, monitoring their Website and caught this before it snowballed into a huge headache and chaotic mess.  It turns out, that someone found the link on the client’s Website, copied the link and then spammed it on an online forum that caters to the “sharing of knowledge about couponing, refunding and frugal living.”

Process of Removing Forum (Spam) Posts

So, to find out about how I could get this post removed for our client from this online coupon forum, I took on a pseudo-investigative journalistic approach.   I simply contacted the moderator from the coupon sharing Website, told them I represented the client and politely emailed them about removing the post with the link in it due to the fact that it is only available for a select, targeted audience.  Although I received no email back, I did notice that within 24 hours the post was taken down.  Success!

The Point About Monitoring Your Hospital’s Website

Offering incentives is a great tactic to help you connect with your community while driving traffic to your Website, but be aware of what could happen if you are not monitoring relevant traffic to these promotions or services.  It may even be wise to put a clause or note on your Website specifying that this promotion/service is only available for a certain area of people.

This case is not closed, because monitoring never ends.

AVID Design specializes in online healthcare marketing and offers hospital Website monitoring.

Add to Technorati Favorites

March 3rd, 2010

Posted in Brand Monitoring, Marketing | No Comments »

Five Most Overlooked Hospital Calls to Action

This is most likely to irk some healthcare marketers, but if it does, consider yourself lucky, because it means that you are on the right path.

Missing the easiest balls can waste tremendous opportunities for glory. Don’t let missed calls to action do this to your hospital’s marketing efforts.

But first take a look at the list below. If you are missing these opportunities to extend a call to action to your audience, it means that you are at least performing the essential actionables that create the opportunities. If you aren’t…well, let this serve as a list of some of the activities for which you should immediately start pursuing!

Blogs

If you are regularly writing a blog for your hospital, good for you. If you are getting a solid base of engaged readers that share your blogs (e.g., RSS, Twitter, social bookmarking) and comment on them, even better.

However, if you blogs aren’t regularly extending an explicit call to action that encourage a visitor to click a link to your Website or subscribe to a newsletter or any other type of action, you are overlooking some of the most prized members of your online community: active ones that are trying to interact with you!

Subscription Confirmations

This one might seem ironic. After all, if somebody subscribes to a newsletter or another feature of your Website, doesn’t that mean they’ve already converted on a call to action? Yes. But why stop there?

When that subscriber completes the subscription process and is then directed to a confirmation page or sent a confirmation e-mail (or both), ending the conversion process is another tragically missed opportunity to continue engaging with clearly active Web user. Keep going by encouraging this person to not consider the confirmation the end of a process, but the beginning of another.

Subscription Cancellations

After all of the work it took to get a subscriber, it’s always a shame to lose them when they unsubscribe. However, just because they unsubscribe to one of your Website’s features doesn’t mean that you are fully divorcing yourself from that person.

Similar to a subscription confirmation, use the cancellation confirmation page or e-mail to extend a new opportunity to keep the user engaged with your content.

E-mail Signatures

Every person to whom you or anybody at your hospital sends an e-mail has the potential to join your ever-expanding roster of social media and blog followers.

Adding something even as simple as “Follow Us” or “Join Us Online” with links to your blog and key social media accounts

Offline Marketing

This is perhaps one of our favorite examples. Although print and other traditional “offline” media have taken a backseat to online marketing tactics, it doesn’t mean that there can’t be some overlap. On the contrary, the more overlap—or integration and interaction—the better.

For instance, if you run a print ad, don’t just stick your hospital’s URL at the bottom of the page. Instead, try to connect your ad’s message to your Website’s functionality. An example: Instead of touting your hospital’s awesome doctors, invite the reader to use your Website’s physician directory to find a physician and then make an online appointment.

Speaking of calls to action, why not take a moment to visit our Website to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter?

AVID Design is an award-winning interactive healthcare marketing consultant.

Add to Technorati Favorites

February 24th, 2010

Posted in Blogs + Blogging, Marketing, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

How Many Hospital Facebook Pages Should You Have?

If your hospital has or is developing a Facebook page for its general facility, what should it do for related facilities and centers (e.g., cancer centers, women and children’s centers)? Is it better to have just one page or several?

Have as many hospital Facebook pages as you want, but be sure that you have the resources to support them.

The answer is simple: Have as many Facebook pages as you want, but be sure that you have the resources to support them.

Think of each of your hospital’s centers as their own independent brands—with their own independent audiences. That means having to create a community and provide content that supports and satisfies each of those audiences. After all, a pregnant mother is probably not any more interested in finding cancer support groups than a cancer patient has in Lamaze tips.

So, although multiple pages might be ideal, it’s not a one size fits all solution. Thus, it’s very important to carefully assess how much time you’ll have to dedicate to each Facebook page. If you can only fully support one general page, then perhaps having multiple barely supported (or worse, completely ignored) pages may not be your best course of action.

What About Twitter and Other Social Media?

Integrating various social media channels that ultimately funnel Web traffic towards a hub—your hospital’s Website—should always be your primary goal with any type of healthcare marketing.

As you are considering your ability to maintain multiple hospital Facebook pages, also think about your ability to develop and support related social media—such as Twitter, a blog, etc. Again, if you can only truly support one center, then choose that center wisely and do your best with it.

In time, not only will you fully realize the benefits of having developed such an integrated social media strategy for your hospital, but you’ll also likely create efficient processes that may help you eventually launch and support similar strategies for other centers.

What is your experience with using Facebook for marketing your hospital and connecting it to your community? Do you use multiple pages or do you keep everything under one general, umbrella site?

AVID Design specializes in hospital Website design, integrated social media strategies for hospitals and more.

Add to Technorati Favorites

February 15th, 2010

Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Top 3 Hospital PPC Campaign Tips

Considering the extreme competition and cost of hospital marketing—especially online hospital marketing—every advantage helps, and that includes pay per click (PPC).

In an ideal world, micromanaging your hospital’s PPC campaign—including its keyword bid rates—would be your full-time job. But in reality, you probably only have maybe a few hours a week to manage dozens of ad groups and hundreds (if not thousands) of keywords. Make the most of it with these tips.

Here are three essential hospital PPC tips that will quickly improve your traffic, conversion rates and ROI:

Geotarget Your Ads

As its name implies, PPC geotargeting (or location targeting, as it’s known in Google AdWords) targets your ad’s visibility to a specific geographic location.

For the majority of hospitals and clinics that typically serve specific metropolitan or regional area, geotargeting makes a world of sense—and especially if you are including your town’s name in your keyword search criteria. After all, what good is paying for somebody in Portland, Maine to click on your PPC ad if your hospital is in Portland, Oregon?

Get More From Your Landing Pages

Pick any of your hospital’s service lines or centers of excellence, and chances are extremely good that you’ve got multiple pages with content that support specific but related concepts and topics.

Yet, for some reason, many hospital PPC campaigns ignore the diversity of potential landing pages and instead have all of their PPC ads direct clickthroughs to the same page—which is usually a top-level page that delivers broad information.

Instead, think about what people that click on your ads probably want. For instance, back pain and spinal conditions: They will usually want to know about definitions, symptoms or treatments.

Most likely, you have a page (or pages) that answer those questions…at least better than your catch-all, top-level page. Instead of pointing all of those people to the same top-level page, give them what they want by having the ad direct them to a more relevant page.

Put another way: Reduce the number of clicks it takes for them to find what they want…or risk one of those clicks being a bounce or exit.

Scale Your PPC Bid Rates

In an ideal world, micromanaging your hospital’s PPC campaign—including its keyword bid rates—would be your full-time job. But in reality, you probably only have maybe a few hours a week to manage dozens of ad groups and hundreds (if not thousands) of keywords.

Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean you have to give all of your ads and keywords the same constant bid rate. One suggestion is to scale them based on the landing page strategy mentioned in the previous section.

Using that definition/symptom/treatment example, think about which of them will provide the highest volume or probability of conversions (read: new patients).

Most likely, those looking for definitions are less likely, those looking for symptoms for symptoms are more likely, and those that know enough about a condition to search for a treatment are even more likely.

For every dollar that you spend on keywords and ads that point to treatment, spend less (say, 75 cents) for symptoms and even less (start low, say, 25 cents).

AVID Design specializes in online healthcare marketing, including hospital PPC campaigns.

Add to Technorati Favorites

February 12th, 2010

Posted in Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO | No Comments »

Top 5 Hospital Blog Topics and Subjects

So, you finally got that shiny new blog site for your hospital…or perhaps you’ve had a blog that has gotten a bit stale. Either way, we often hear about the challenge many hospitals face with finding things to write about for their blog.

Frustrated or have writer’s block with your blog? Don’t worry…there’s always something to write about!

Although most advice for blogs usually suggest that you write copy that will attract visitors and be useful for them, there still remains the looming question: what exactly is that for hospitals?

1. Commentary from hospital leadership and physicians. At best, hospital administrators are attributed to sterile, predictable quotes in news releases. But with a blog, they express themselves in more of a personal manner.

Additionally, if your blog is enabled for comments (which it should be), it encourages the “social” nature of a blog’s designation as a kind of social media.

2. Your hospital’s service lines and centers of excellence. Use your main Website’s list of services and centers as your index for top-level subjects, and then use your blog as a bridge between them and readers that might not be finding you through SEO, PPC or other means of attracting traffic.

3. Local and regional healthcare advice. If you are in Minnesota in January, a blog about preventing sunburns might not work…but a blog about ways to properly prepare and nourish your children’s bodies for harsh winters might. Or, if there’s a spike in a particular illness or infection, use your blog to provide tips for prevention, treatment, etc.

4. Volunteerism and special events. Although you are probably also covering these topics in your Website’s news section, there’s no reason that you can’t give additional nods and announcements in your blog. Even a collection of photos and a few captions can go a long way with showing appreciation and connecting your community.

5. Top “x” lists. These types of blogs are always extremely popular, and here’s your chance to quiz your hospital’s experts to get qualified information. For instance, what are the top five things that somebody preparing for heart surgery would want to know?

Bonus tip: Along with integrating SEO best practices into your metadata and blog copy, be sure to localize your content with your city and state whenever applicable or appropriate.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of topics for hospital blog content. What others do you use or suggest?

AVID Design offers hospital and healthcare Website content creation, optimization and consultation.

Add to Technorati Favorites

February 10th, 2010

Posted in Blogs + Blogging, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

31% of Users Want Online Healthcare Video to Solve Problems, Offer Incentives

No sooner than after we finished publishing our healthcare online video SEO blog series, eMarketer released some extremely interesting figures about ways that Internet users want hospitals to use online video and new media.

Click image to see full-size image.

Although the survey data also included figures for other industries and sectors, healthcare was often at the top (or bottom) of most categories:

• 31%: Solve my Problems/Provide Product Service Information

• 31%: Offer Me Incentives

• 26%: Solicit My Feedback on Products/Services

• 25%: Develop New Ways for Me to Interact with Brands

• 19%: Entertain Me

• 19%: Market to Me

What the Figures and Findings Mean to Healthcare Marketers

Extrapolating the real meanings of these findings doesn’t require too much thought, whether looking at the top or bottom ends of the results:

• At the top, users want healthcare videos to provide solid reasons to come to your hospital. If it’s not a solution to their specific problems, then it’s an incentive that users desire—of which both are quite presumably being measured against what your competitors can or can’t deliver.

• At the bottom, users clearly don’t want to waste their time. Most healthcare marketers would likely not create videos that are designed to purely entertain visitors, but they might be inclined to use video to explicitly or aggressively market their brands. At any rate, neither are users want.

Do you agree with the results? Do they compare to objectives for your hospital’s online videos? What else do you think users want or don’t want?

AVID Design offers full-scale and mobile healthcare video production solutions.

Add to Technorati Favorites

February 5th, 2010

Posted in Analytics and Metrics, Online Video / Rich Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Creating a Video Sitemap on Google

Getting traffic to video content on your hospital’s Website such as physician video testimonials and virtual hospital videos can be a tricky task, especially if you do not have a video Sitemap in place.

Creating and sumbitting a video Sitemap is important for video content on your hospital's Website.

Closing out AVID Design’s blog series on video search engine optimization (VSEO), it’s important to know that for optimizing videos you must create a specific Sitemap for them so search engines, like Google, can make your video content searchable for your hospital’s Website visitors.

By using a Sitemap protocol, and video specific tags you can easily create your own video Sitemap. Be sure to include the following:

• A keyword rich description in the metadata fields
• Links to any landing pages that video content is on
• The location of the video player, video file and thumbnail file
• The Sitemap location in your robots.txt file

After you create your video Sitemap you are ready to submit it to Google Webmaster Tools—which also provides great tools for analytics, configurations and diagnostics— and for it to be indexed.

All this should help you get your video content fully searchable on Google Video and be listed in Google searches.

Check out some of these great Websites/articles for information, tips and tricks on creating a video Sitemap:

• Google Webmaster Central: Creating Video Sitemaps
• How to use Google Video XML Sitemaps for Video SEO by Mark R. Robertson of ReelSEO.com

Has anyone out there created a video Sitemap for their hospital’s video content?  Do you have any additional tips on doing such?

This concludes our VSEO blog series, but you can always check out other blog posts or any of AVID Design’s services including  healthcare video production, healthcare Website design and healthcare content strategy and creation.

Add to Technorati Favorites

January 28th, 2010

Posted in Online Video / Rich Media, SEO, SEO Tips, Tricks and Advice, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Engagement Objects – Interactivity for Hospital VSEO

Imagine a hospital’s Website with no photos on their online nursery page, no map on the location/directions page or no audio on the patient testimonial’s page.  You’d feel disconnected, lost and distracted when navigating to those pages.

Thankfully, many hospitals embrace the usage of multimedia elements such as photos, maps, video and audio on their Websites.  These multimedia elements make up what industry professionals like to call “engagement objects.”

This engagement ring captures your eye - the same way engagement objects on a hospital's Website can.

The Role of Engagement Objects

Engagement objects do just what they say—engage.  They include any kind of interactivity that enhances the user’s experience such as:

• Audio Files
• Charts
• Live Streaming
• Maps
• Photos
• Polls
• Video

Engagement objects play a contributing role in how search engines, like Google, determine a Website’s ranking through a blended search.  A blended search, or universal search, is where search engines include these engagement objects as part of their search result.

Having an engagement object such as a physician video about what to expect with cardiac surgery in the area of mitral valve replacement—following best practices for video search engine optimization (VSEO)—can help achieve a higher page ranking for your hospital’s Website.

So, engagement objects score big for both hospital marketers looking to up their rankings and Website users looking to become involved.

Do you think hospitals will use more video and engagement objects on their Websites in order to gain a higher page ranking?

Our final VSEO blog series ends Thursday with a look at Creating a Video Sitemap on Google.

Add to Technorati Favorites

January 27th, 2010

Posted in Online Video / Rich Media, SEO, Web 2.0 | No Comments »