Share Moving Media

5 Healthcare Marketing Tools to Consider for 2020

By

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

The Top 5 Types of Content

By

When “Content is King” made its way into healthcare marketing the past few years, it felt like our industry was moving in the right direction with a strong focus on creating relevant content that our audience wanted.

And it sounded simple enough. Nearly all the materials that we create in marketing can be considered content and can be packaged in many different forms: articles, info-graphics, blogs, videos, white papers, case studies, podcasts – the list is endless.

We all nodded our heads in agreement and excitedly jumped on the content bandwagon. But then came the challenging task of creating a comprehensive content strategy that includes the kinds of topics that our audience wants to hear and across different media channels – all on top of our day jobs.

So, when I read, They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan, I was struck by what seemed like a simplistic idea: When you’re building your content strategy, create content based on the questions that your customers ask. Sheridan suggests that there are 5 types of content that best parallel the way that people search and that yield the best traffic, conversions and overall brand perception.

Who, What, Which and How Much?

As you look through the list of content subject types below, think about the last big purchase you made, either for yourself or for your business. My guess is that you probably sought for answers to several, if not all, of these questions.

  1. Pricing and Costs

    It feels counter-intuitive to talk about costs or price in your content, but the reality is that buyers want that information and they tend to trust brands they feel are more transparent with it. This type of content also gives you the opportunity to educate customers on reasons for price differences in your industry.

  2. Problems

    Like price, this subject type sometimes feels like a danger zone, but if you identify any negative perceptions or reactions to your brands or products, you create content that helps turn weaknesses into strengths and directly addresses any concerns. This content type goes back to building trust by providing an honest answer to your customers about your industry and products.

  3. Versus and Comparisons

    I was recently considering a car purchase and like most buyers, I was researching a few different options and wanted to see how they compared. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a post from Toyota showed up in the top 5 search results when I googled one of their models versus a competitor’s model. And the content in the post blew me away. It included an overview of their model and an overview of their competitor’s model, and their conclusion didn’t name a clear winner. Instead, it reiterated a few pros of their model and a few pros of the other model. It felt like they respected the intelligence of their buyers and wanted to provide helpful and unbiased information.

  4. Reviews

    In today’s purchasing arena, it’s all about “social proof.” When shopping on Amazon, the second option to sort by (only after price) for product results is “sort by: average customer review.” Case studies, testimonials and product reviews top the list of content that we turn to for “personal” recommendations of products, services and tools. And while we love these honest endorsements of our brand (seriously, these pieces are like gold to marketers), we can also create meaningful review content that includes other players in our industry that will help our customers and bolster our position as a trusted resource.

  5. Best in Class

    This content subject could be approached as an article on the “Best in Class” manufacturers in the industry, the “best practices” to follow for your specific category or even “Top 10” lists of things that buyers should know about a particular topic in your niche.

The great news about these content subject types is you are already an expert in your field, and by creating content that answers questions for your customers, you educate them and earn their trust.



A Whopper of an Idea

By

Recently, a major global brand did the unthinkable. A fast food giant told its customers that for one day, it would not be offering its best-selling product.

It gets crazier. The company then asked its customers for that day to go to its chief competitor.

According to GRITDAILY:

This September in Argentina, Burger King launched a campaign called a ‘Day Without Whopper,’ where it stopped selling their top-selling product, The Whopper, for a day in order to re-direct and increase sales to McDonald’s. But why would the two fiercest burger competitors join forces?

The reason to initiate the campaign was to help McDonald’s with their annual fundraising campaign of donating $2 to Children With Cancer for every Big Mac and signature burger that they sell.

Burger King and McDonald’s Join Hands to Fight Cancer

Marketing strategy? Absolutely. But one done for a good cause. It’s resonated well on social media. While it probably won’t produce a huge spike in revenue in the short term, it will probably produce long-term good vibes for the burger chain.  

Plus, consumers are big on brand engagement in charitable causes. More and more commercials are geared toward how brands are working to change communities or be a positive force on the global stage.

What would this look like in the healthcare space? What if a major brand like Johnson & Johnson lent its social media platform or services to support the cause of a competitor? What if Medtronic encouraged team members to support a charity of another organization for a day?

What are some marketing campaigns that you’ve seen successful cross over into charitable causes?

What is Amazon?

By

Seems like an easy enough question. You may answer:

A virtual retailer of everything from books to electronics.

TV and Movie show producer.

What is Amazon Business?

This isn’t as easy to answer, is it? I can tell you what Amazon Business will be though. Amazon Business will look a lot like what you think of Amazon personally. Why? Because that is how the consumer (you and me) want to buy stuff.

Said another way in the healthcare setting: Nurse Nancy will want to request and receive her supplies at her nurses’ station the same way she orders her hair care products at home. The preference of how people want to order and receive stuff at home and work will start to merge into very similar expectations.

Check out this video I saw on LinkedIn, posted by Orca Pacific, a full-service agency that helps brands maximize their relationship with Amazon. It’s 6 minutes long and is worth every second.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6577268145944346625-QN1C/

Here are my takeaways:

  • Advertising spend with Amazon will increase 470% by 2023
  • Amazon is the dominant Search Engine for products
  • Amazon is morphing from a Search Engine to a Discovery Engine
  • Brands must understand Amazon is:
    • A Big Retailer
    • An Ad Platform
    • A Product Search Engine

If you are currently selling through Amazon today or may in the future, it’d be wise to understand Amazon. Brands that want to succeed will need to have plenty of content drawing prospects to their brand all over the place. Not just on Amazon but also on client’s sites, in whitepapers, in infographics, user reviews and at live events. It seems complicated, but it’s not; brands need to be where their prospects are looking, engaging and asking about the product or category.

I’d love to hear your thoughts or experiences with Amazon.

What good is LinkedIn if you are not looking for a job?

By

I have been on LinkedIn for a while now and keep wondering- what good it is? I guess it is helpful if you need to contact someone whose contact information you do not have. Or if you want to know what products and services your network is promoting.

But, the single most valuable part of LinkedIn for me is the marketing experts and their interesting, timely and compelling posts. One of my favorites is Michael Brenner; if you are not following him, you should! He publishes on LinkedIn a couple times a week and it is always thoughtful, practical and actionable advice and direction.

This week he posted 33 of his favorite quotes.

Here are 3 quotes that really made me laugh!

  1. “Market like the year you are in!” ~ Gary Vaynerchuck
  2. “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”~ David Packard
  3. “Banners have 99 problem and a click ain’t one.” ~ Scott Sorokin

Here are 3 that kind of make me sad and hit too close to home for many of our clients.

  1. “Content Marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.” ~ Jon Buscall
  2. “Stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis
  3. “Behind every piece of bad content is an executive who asked for it.” Michael Brenner

Here is a link to the full list.

Sign up for his newsletter, you will thank me!

I’d love to hear from you, who is someone you follow that makes you a better marketer? Email me at jpritchard@ShareMovingMedia.com