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Coronavirus: COVID-19

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It’s all anyone is talking about. For many it incites grave concern, while others express skepticism about the actual risk. But whether you’re on the side of alarm or doubt, there’s no denying the impact that COVID-19 is having on a global scale.

And while the public may not have been anticipating this global challenge, the good news is that our industry has given great focus to response methods in times of emergency and disaster.

We’ve been here before

In each new situation, whether it was Ebola, ACA, IV shortages, Hurricane Katrina or another challenge, our community of suppliers and distributors has taken the charge of supporting your customers and providers. Scanning the pages of Repertoire Magazine and The Journal of Healthcare Contracting gives you a recurring theme of prescriptive content aimed at helping clinicians prepare for weathering the storms.

Weather your next emergency

In the event of an emergency

Road to recovery

AHRMM meeting features in depth look at pandemic preparedness

We are a practiced industry that has weathered these storms and will weather more in the future. As healthcare marketers, we have the unique opportunity to both support our community and inspire confidence that there are measures and programs in place for such challenges as coronavirus.

We’ve compiled a short list of Emergency Response Programs and reference pieces to help you and your customers.

CDC’s Supply Chain Disaster Preparedness Manual

Henry Schein’s Disaster Response Program

McKesson’s Disaster Preparedness Response Efforts

Cardinal Health’s How to Prepare for a Crisis

Medline’s Disaster Preparedness Checklist


Understanding Your Audience: The Value in Market Segmentation

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A “one-size-fits-all” strategy rarely works beyond socks and gloves—it’s certainly not a technique successful companies use to target or understand customers, or both! In this day and age audiences are receiving messages from all directions. So how do businesses ensure that their message isn’t lost in all the noise?

Market (or audience) segmentation is defined by a business dictionary as “subdividing a large homogenous market into clearly identifiable segments having similar needs, wants, or demand characteristics.” This strategy allows businesses to accurately target new customers and understand the needs of existing customers.

There are four basic types of market segmentation strategies: psychographic, geographic, behavioral, and demographic. Geographic is perhaps the most commonly used; and demographic, wherein an audience is targeted by variables such as gender, age, income, housing type, and education level, is arguably the most familiar (what new parent hasn’t received a diaper ad soon after their abundant newborn-related Google searches)?

Today, however, we want to discuss psychographic segmentation. This type of market analysis collects and examines the more elusive characteristics of your audience, such as interests, habits, attitudes, emotions, and communication and other preferences. You may be thinking, “That sounds difficult” or “What’s the use of that?” Isn’t it better to know that the majority of your customers are, for example, unmarried, urban-dwelling twenty-somethings?

Of course that type of demographic information is useful, but people who fall within the same demographic profile can still have fundamental differences in likes, needs, and wants. Remember, one size rarely fits all. For example, perhaps half of that demographic is open to purchasing a certain make of car, and the other half wouldn’t be caught dead in that vehicle. Why? The demographics don’t explain it, but the psychographics will.

It may also seem logical to tailor your marketing based on generational perceptions, which requires certain demographical information about your audience. But this type of stereotyping leads to blanket assumptions that are rarely accurate or useful. Overgeneralizing different generations is something that has been going on for, well, generations! I think we all know that not all baby boomers are workaholics who can’t work an iPhone, and not all millennials immediately leave the office when the clock hits 5:00 and only read e-books! Psychographic segmentation allows companies to view their audience in a “made to order” manner (rather than the “one size” generalization) for more tailored messaging.

These two segmentation methods are not mutually exclusive! In fact, demographic information can be a great starting point that allows you to develop an outline of your customer base. Psychographic information allows you to dig deeper, discovering not only what product or service your customer may be interested in but also why. This insight into the motivations of your target audience offers a better understanding of consumer behavior than demographic information can offer. This understanding empowers you to customize marketing to what will hopefully be a more responsive market.

Market segmentation allows you to understand your audience and tailor your message. Demographics can only get you so far—a psychographic analysis of your market could be the route to a better understanding of your customers’ motivations and values.

Holiday Marketing Campaigns for Healthcare Marketers: Have You Made One Yet?

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Every year your audience is bombarded with holiday messages.

To make sure your prospects and customers are paying attention… you need to know what healthcare marketing campaigns will spur them into action.

Plus, people are expecting more campaigns and promotions during the holidays… will you let your audience go to someone else? Or will you keep their attention this season?

The holidays serve as an important time to make sure you’re staying top of mind for your audience. But, it’s not always easy trying to figure out the right campaign to set up.

Here are 2 compelling holiday marketing campaigns you can emulate to launch your next big campaign.

Giving Back (CISCO)

Oftentimes, the simplest campaigns are the most effective.

Back in 2012, CISCO (a networking software firm) put together a noble charitable Christmas campaign titled, “How Do You Give Back?” CISCO created this Facebook campaign and asked their audience to share stories of how they gave back to their community.

So what? Anybody can ask their community a simple question. What’s so special about this campaign?

CISCO created an interesting spin with the campaign. For every response they received, CISCO would donate four meals to the World Food Program.

The campaign blew up. The holiday campaign not only focused on giving (which is a common theme around Christmas), but it created a flurry of engagement on social media.

The reason it worked so well is because people didn’t even have to pull out their wallets to make a difference. All they had to do was write a comment. They knew they would be helping four people receive a meal which made the campaign go viral.

CISCO was not only able to give back during the holidays in a big way… But they were also able to leap above the noise of nearly every other holiday campaign that year. And creating that type of engagement is not an easy task for a B2B company.

Create A Content Series (The Economist)

As soon as Halloween is over, Christmas moves on in (whether you like it or not). You can either take it or leave it, but if you want to have a successful December, I suggest you take it and run with it.

The Economist decided to take advantage of the season at the beginning of December with ‘Advent’. No, they didn’t send out advent calendars filled with chocolate. They sent out a different type of advent calendar. They sent out an advent calendar of content.

They created a digital advent calendar that took you to a new piece of content every day leading up to Christmas. Whether it was a video, a blog post, or a simple tip, they took their audience through an exciting journey leading up to Christmas.

As much as you already know how important content marketing is, It’s not always easy coming up with ideas. This advent calendar is an easy win in any healthcare marketer’s content strategy for the holidays. Plus, you don’t even have to create 25 pieces of new content. You could repurpose previously made content and work it in throughout the calendar.

If you’re thinking it’s still too much content for one month, just do half. Skip the advent calendar and create a “12 Days of Christmas” content experience.

What campaigns moved you during the holidays? Let us know what your favorite holiday marketing campaigns are.

Leverage Your Sales Team’s Customer Insight to Create Great Content

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About a decade ago, healthcare marketers began realizing content creation was an essential part of the modern healthcare business’ marketing strategy. Ever since then, they’ve been working to create content that wins their prospect’s attention and fuels sales.

According to research by SiriusDecisions, sales teams don’t even use 60-70% of marketing content to close sales. This means a huge amount of the marketing budget is going to waste (and content that should be closing sales is being unused).

Content creation is usually run by the marketing team. Healthcare marketers invest a lot of time and money into researching, strategizing, creating, and distributing content. However, there is an untapped area the sales team can use every day to create high-quality content using customer knowledge.

Sales teams are the ones who often interact with your customers the most. You can use these interactions as an opportunity to fuel your content creation.

Here are 3 ways you can get your sales team involved in the content creation process by connecting customer knowledge and sales insights.

1. Develop Customer Personas Before Focusing on Content Creation

Before you can begin to start creating relevant content, you have to understand who you’re talking to.

You may have some generic target market information on your customers, but it needs to be taken further. User Testing Blog refers to a customer persona as “a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you’ve collected from user research and web analytics.”

Get your sales team to begin asking your customers questions, doing surveys, and extract that data to create in-depth customer personas. They communicate with prospects, leads, and customers every day, and are familiar with your customer’s motivations, aspirations, habits, challenges, and desires.

If you make content for the sake of creating something, you’ll lose your customer’s attention. By developing customer personas, you’ll be able to create content that resonates with them, keeping them coming back over and over again.

2. Use Frequently Asked Questions To Create Content

There are a variety of questions your sales team gets asked every day. You can use this sales insight to create content around the topics that come up frequently.

Most of these questions tend to be how-to questions. You can use these questions to create FAQ-style content on your site.

One bonus to creating FAQ-centric content is that has a higher chance than other content to get highlighted as a featured snippet in a Google Search.

3. Be Direct with Your Customers About Content Creation

Your customers are more than willing to help answer your questions, especially if they know it will help them, so have questions ready that directly involve the customer in content creation.

Use these 5 examples to start. Then create more specific questions based on your specific business and customer knowledge:

  • Ask them what they’re struggling with
  • Ask them what they want to learn
  • Ask them how they like to receive content (email, push notification, etc.)
  • Ask them how often they like to consume content
  • Ask them what types of content they like to receive (blogs, videos, audio, etc.)

You’ll be amazed at how willing your customers are to help you out in content creation.Instead of guessing on your content strategy, get your customers to give your sales team the answers.

5 Healthcare Marketing Tools to Consider for 2020

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Healthcare marketing is changing rapidly.

The question is, are you prepared for 2020? And do you have the tools you need to get ahead of the pack next year?

Staying up to date with the latest marketing tools will save you time and make sure you stay ahead of the curve in the industry. The times are long gone where you can solve your healthcare marketing challenges all by yourself.

As a healthcare marketer, you have to analyze what your customers are saying, where they say it, and how they feel about your brand messaging. Plus, you have to make sure you’re optimizing your efforts so you get the most out of every campaign.

Here are 5 marketing tools you can use to make sure you get ahead in the healthcare industry in 2020.

1.All-In-One: HubSpot Marketing

With a variety of tools, HubSpot can help you grow no matter what stage your healthcare business is at.

They have several tools for free. To capture new leads, you can use their popup forms, web forms, and even live chat software. You can also send your email marketing campaigns through the free CRM where you can analyze all data points and track visitor behavior on your website.

If you expand into HubSpot’s paid services, you can really dive deep into marketing automation.

As an all-in-one solution, HubSpot lets you manage your content, social media, track your emails, connect your leads all in one place, making it one of the top marketing tools to use in 2020.

Price: Free to $3,200/month (depending on your plan)

2. Ad Optimizer: Needls

If you do Facebook and Instagram ads, you’ll want to start using Needls. It’s a digital marketing tool that helps you manage your ads on these two platforms.

Needls analyzes social media conversations 24/7 and determines the right audiences for your ads based on the results. This is a great way to automatically provide value for your potential customers. It sends Facebook and Instagram ads for the products and services they need when they need them.

It uses a 3-step process to optimize your ads:

  1. It creates ads based on the information you input about your business.
  2. It monitors ads in real-time.
  3. It continuously optimizes ad content to make them more effective over time.

Price: Plans start at $100/month

3.Social Media Content Organizer: Kontentino

Kontentino is an intuitive social media content calendar.

It lets you:

● Organize and combine all social media posts in one place
● Preview them before posting
● Schedule posts for different social media channels
● Tag pages in posts

Price: Kontentino starts at $10/month

4.Project Streamliner: Asana

Asana isn’t explicitly a marketing tool, but it is one of the best marketing tools if you manage a team or need a simple way to organize your marketing projects.

It’s a workflow management system with an easy-to-use interface to streamline each step of a project, from goal to completion.

Price: Free to $19.99/month

5.Email Marketing Solution: MailChimp

Email is still the number one marketing channel with an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent. In 2020, it will only be more important for professionals in healthcare marketing to hone in on their email strategy.

MailChimp is an email service provider that allows you to create and automate email campaigns to engage with leads, nurture new customers, and generate revenue.

Price: Free to $199/month