Healthcare Marketing: 25 Interesting Facts about Social Media

October 27, 2011

In her social media and PR blog, “Commentz“, Sarah Evans and her staff compile a lot of interesting stats. She cherry-picked the most relevant for marketers and recently shared them with Ad Age. They can be quite useful to healthcare marketers.

1. “Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US.”

2. “Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.”

3. “Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.”

4. “22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn.”

5. “In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly.”

6. “The ‘Weinergate’ scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal ‘the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.’”

7. Instagram “currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second.”

8. “It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity.”

9. “Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.”

10. “In the last election Google was the largest player — the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site.”

11. “59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.”

12. “In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a record for The Washington Post. Of that, 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone.”

13. “25% of hotels [are] still ignoring social media.”

14. “Businesses are paying Twitter $120,000 to sponsor a promoted trending topic for a day. [...] That’s up from $25,000 to $30,000 when the feature was launched in April 2010.”

15. “AOL’s newsroom is now bigger than The New York Times’.”

16. “Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it’s a channel that you need to be aware of. According to Google, mobile web traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013.”

17. “Twitter is 6-7 times smaller than Facebook.”

18. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.”

19. “130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.”

20. “Users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.”

21. “Nearly half (42%) indicated that if they’ve already allocated a portion of their marketing spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media spend.”

22. “13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.”

23. “According to HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for large.”

24. “33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States.”

25. “Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content.”

 


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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: 5 Ways to Improve Your Hospital’s Brand

October 25, 2011

Your hospital will live or die by its brand.  What can help make your brand stronger?  Here are five tips to improve your hospital’s brand.

Here are excerpts from an article from Becker’s Hospital Review by Lindsey Dunn after interviewing Steve Rivkin, founder, Rivkin & Associates, a healthcare branding and communications consultancy, and co-author of Repositioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis (McGraw-Hill, 2010).

1. Think of your brand as a promise. A hospital’s brand is a promise of what the consumer should expect and how the hospital will perform.  Think about a brand in the same way as a person’s reputation. You earn a good reputation by doing the right thing, doing it well, and doing it consistently. And just like a reputation, a brand is a living entity — it evolves, and it is enriched or undermined by your actions.

2. Understand your strengths, weaknesses. Any hospital’s branding efforts should begin with an understanding of its market share, strengths, weaknesses and consumers’ perception and beliefs about its services. Consumer research should ask community members what they think is important when choosing a hospital, how the hospital is perceived and how it compares to competing facilities.  This research will reveal if the hospital is preferred, and if it isn’t preferred, will give some indication of why it’s not preferred.

Mr. Rivkin notes that consumer perceptions don’t always match reality, but it’s perceptions that influence volume.
It’s action first, communications second.  Eighty-five percent of changing a perception is what you actually do, and only 15 percent is what you say about it.

3. Differentiate. After identifying areas of strength and improvement, hospitals should determine what differentiates it from competitors and whether that point of differentiation is important to consumers. Potential differentiators include:

•    The patient experience— for instance, best customer service/patient satisfaction scores in the market;
•    Centers of excellence for specific service lines;
•    Heritage/history in a community;
•    Highest rated physicians;
•    Industry awards received (top hospital lists, Magnet status, etc.);
•    Newest technology/cutting-edge procedures; and
•    Widest range of services in market area.

4. “Sell” the brand to employees first. After determining how a hospital will position itself, hospital leaders should sell that identity or brand first to its employees. “Your workforce is a critical part of a branding program. Everything starts with your own people. Don’t expect to persuade the folks outside about much of anything, unless the people inside believe it first.”

5. Market the brand and connect it to the bottom line. After gaining buy-in from employees, hospitals should take their branding messages to the public through public relations efforts, advertising, direct marketing and other methods. Hospital marketers should be careful to quantify the results of all efforts.  Measuring return on investment will direct hospitals toward the most effective marketing tactics.

Your brand is one of your hospital’s most valuable assets.  Great attention should be given to its care. The stronger the brand the more successful your hospital will be.

 

 

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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Don’t Let the Volume of the Patient’s Voice Drown Out Yours

July 15, 2011

Although consumers have a louder voice than ever before, make no mistake about it, you still own and control your brand.  Marketers are still responsible for the brand’s narrative.   

“The consumer is now in control.”  You hear it often.  You’ve probably read it in some of my blogs.  But is it ultimately true?  Yes consumers have a louder voice.  Yes consumers have new and expanded ways to exert their influence on a brand.  But ultimately brands still control themselves.  And we must not forget that.

Look at some of the ways consumers can now influence a brand:

  • DVRs allow consumers to skip past television commercials
  • Use of social media to critique or criticize a brand
  • Provide content and produce ads for brands
  • The myriad of opportunities to give input and suggestions to brands
  • The many avenues available to hold brands’ feet to the fire and make them accountable.

So it is true, consumers can now influence brands in ways never before available.  And that’s probably a good thing.  But that doesn’t give them ultimate control.  It just requires brand managers and companies to be more responsible and more diligent.

True consumers can use DVRs to skip commercials but they have always had that right.  No advertiser has ever been able to force a consumer to see or watch or hear it ads.  It’s still incumbent on advertisers to attract and hold the attention of consumers to see and hear its messages.

Groupon saw and felt the backlash for it’s ill-advised Super Bowl spots.  The company was forced to pull the ad and apologize.  But is that an example of consumer control or thoughtlessness by the brand?

Consumers can now create content for brands.  Many brands are soliciting consumer assistance with the content of their advertising.  But would anyone just laud the brand building power of consumer directed spots for Doritos and Pepsi in recent years?  If consumers now have control of the brand, it’s because brands have given it over to them.

And some would point to consumer reaction to Gap’s effort to modernize its logo only to repeal its efforts at the appearance of consumer complaint in social media.  But was their backpedaling justified?  Only a very some percentage of GAP customers weighed in on the issue.  I contend the vast majority of their customers didn’t care.  And compare that to the Sci-Fi channel that would endure widespread disapproval when they changed their name to Syfi.  But the network did not waver and as result, now the network is setting new levels of viewership and success.

True, consumers have more voice.  A louder voice.  But that is no excuse for a marketer to give up control of its brand.  It requires more work, more accountability, more thoughtfulness and more discernment.  But the brand is still responsible for itself.   It’s a cop-out to concede ultimate control to the consumer.  Sure brands should react and respond to the needs and desires of consumers.  And letting consumers have input is essential in today’s marketplace (as if it hasn’t been before).  Ultimate control however still rests with the brand.

Mike Wolfsohn, Chief Creative Officer at High Wide and Handsome , contributed an article on this topic recently in Ad Age   and stated, “It’s critical to distinguish a consumer’s increased ability to amplify a brand’s successes and failures from his or her actual control over the story a brand tells.  In the purest sense, consumers have always wielded immense influence with their wallet.  That their votes are now cast on public websites long before the ballots are counted on confidential P&Ls only makes it easier for marketers to react more quickly.”  

For healthcare marketers, as well as all marketers, we still control our brand.   Yes it requires more work to shepherd a brand in a more complex media environment, but it is still within our control.  Unless we choose to give that control away.  But we must not.  Now more that ever, we should seek consumer input, listen to their leanings and use that information to have even more control over our brands than we have ever had before.


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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Social Media Rule One – Start Small

May 12, 2011

Success in social media is not necessarily having a complex social media strategy with multiple tactics – but it’s doing ONE thing well.

The pressure is on.  Social media is here and here to stay.  It is a new way of doing business and if you are not doing it, you are behind.  And there are so many things to do. Facebook, Twitter, blogging, YouTube and viral marketing just for starters.  And as healthcare marketers we need to be engaged in all of these to be successful.  At least that’s what we are led to believe.

But the fact is that each of these social networking options requires time and effort but few of us have a larger staff or more resources.   Healthcare marketers still have all the responsibilities they’ve always had…and more – in most cases.  And social marketing requires time.  So we are left overwhelmed and confused.  We feel the pressure to become engaged but how do we get it all done?

A bit of advice is to relax a little.  And start small.  It’s impossible to do everything at once.  Even more impossible to do all of them well.  And still keep up with your other important responsibilities.   We all have the long list of things to do and the daunting task of getting them accomplished.  And that list includes multiple social media tactics. But maybe this is the wrong approach.  Perhaps the best thing to do is to start with one thing and do it well.

Brian Sheehan, associate professor of advertising at the Newhouse School Syracuse University gave this advice in a recent article in Ad Age, “since most companies have no new people, just do one thing.  And then do it really well. Once you have mastered this, then – and only then—think about doing a second social media program.”  Forget about the list of 10 things to do to be successful in social media or the seven steps in mastering social media.  For most healthcare organizations that’s totally impractical because it will lead to either paralyzation, because you can’t get it done, or a very weak effort, because you are spread too thin.

Social media is about engaging consumers in meaningful conversations.  That’s it!  And if you do a really good job of that, social networking can be very effective.  And if you don’t do it well, you are better off not doing social media at all.  If we are trying to do too much, more than we can handle, it will not be successful.

Choose what you think would work best for your organization.  The thing you think would engage your audience and best meets the needs of your organization.  The one thing that has the best chance of success.   Choose one thing and do it as well as you can. So let’s get started.  But keep it simple.  Keep it small. Do one thing and do it well.  And if you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all.

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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Six Steps to Break Through Social Media Clutter

April 29, 2011

Here are six basic strategies for using social media effectively without being overwhelmed. 

Healthcare marketers are wading in and getting their feet wet in social media.  There is a very large audience on social media and many of them are open to establishing meaningful and useful relationships with brands.  Especially around topics that are important to them.  And healthcare is certainly one of them.

But there is so much noise in social media.  Like practically all mediums, it’s difficult to be noticed, to be heard above all the noise.  And marketers are also finding, as they begin to utilize social media, it can be all consuming.  It can become a monster that constantly needs to be fed.

So how can you establish or enhance your brand and build meaningful relationships, breaking through the clutter but not letting it consume you?  Dave Olsen, the Community Marketing Director at HootSuite,, writing for TalentZoo.com, outlined several tips for social media effectiveness.  Here are six strategies drawing from his comments.

1.    Start by Listening

Listen to those active on social media.  Listen to what they are saying.  Learn about their desires, concerns, behaviors and attitudes.  Listen with a discerning ear to learn.  And you can respond to relevant comments with advice, information, tips, concerns, etc.  Do not try to sell.  Just engage them when appropriate.

2.    Reach out to Influencers

Engage those who can be influencers.  Build relationships with them and then ask them to share their experiences with others.

3.    Instant Focus Group

You can get instant feedback to just about any question you may have.   New service, proposed changes, patients’ concerns can all be discovered by asking for feedback.  It can provide very valuable input.

4.    Learn about Competitors

Listen to what’s being said about your competitors.  Set up a system to retrieve comments being made about your competitors.  This information can be very helpful intelligence alerting you to changes, new initiatives and issues concerning your competitors.  And it can help you identify new opportunities.

5.    Early Warning System

Rumors, negative comments, criticism, bad reviews can all be very damaging.  You need to be listening to the conversations and weigh in appropriately.  By being aware of what being said about your brand, you have the opportunity to address falsehoods, correct misconceptions and squelch rumors.

6.    Play Party Host

There are all types of people who comment on social media.  Your role is to keep the conversation going.  Make sure everyone is civil and behaves appropriately.   Create the tone.  Make sure it’s helpful and consistent with your brand.

These tips are simple strategies that can help you utilize social networking sites.  They can be implemented without requiring a burdensome amount of effort – but yet be very effective.


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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Television Having a “Senior Moment”

April 28, 2011

Television is now targeting older adults with its programming.  And is the place to reach aging baby boomers.    

For years television programming has been directed to the coveted 18-49 year olds.  They were the ones most likely to buy products and switch brands.  But that has changed in the land of television watching. The 80 million baby boomers are aging out of this demographic with the oldest ones turning 65 and the youngest ones reaching 47.  And this group is the segment of the market that has money and is willing to spend it on everything from cars to technology to vacations,  unlike other previous aging generations who decreased their spending as they got older.

Look at today’s primetime lineup with shows starring older actors like Tom Selleck, Kathy Bates and Mark Harmon.  And the inclusion of Steven Tyler as an Idol judge.   And older leading stars on House and Modern Family.  The networks are really catering to an older audience.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chozich cites that boomers average watching 170 hours of television per month, which is five to six hours per day, compared to the overall average of four hours and 49 minutes.  The average age for “NCIS” (the number one rated drama) is 57.  And viewers 55+ make up over 60% of the viewers for “The Good Wife” and “Dancing With The Stars.”

So what does this mean to healthcare marketers?  It means television is a very viable medium for reaching our target audiences.  We know the heaviest users of healthcare services are those who are older.  Boomers are a huge share of the market for hospitals and they will continue to be.  And television effectively reaches them.

Although there has been much talk about the demise of television and competition for screen time from other sources, for reaching healthcare’s largest audience, television is one of the mediums of choice. Sure television’s audience is fragmented but that is actually an advantage because it allows for even more specific targeting.

Seniors and boomers are our largest market.  And in front of television screen is where you will find them.  Boomers are indeed “the TV generation”.   And as they age, television programming is aging with them.

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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: 1 in 5 Use Social Media to Make Healthcare Decisions

March 31, 2011
Americans are using social media to gather information about their healthcare. 1 in 5 persons in a recent survey, confirmed they use social media to influence their healthcare decisions.
This according to research conducted by National Research Corporation of more than 23,000 Americans – the largest, most current research on the subject.
Summary of the findings:
  • 94% of the respondents said they had used Facebook as a source to gather information on their healthcare.
  • 32% had used YouTube as a healthcare information source.
  • Twitter came in third – tying with MySpace for 18% of respondents.
  • Location-based website FourSquare received a 2 percent response.

Additional findings:

  • 1 in 4 respondents said social media was “very likely” or “likely” to influence their healthcare decisions.
  • 32% said their trust level in social media was “very high” or “high”.
  • Only 7.5% said their trust level in social media was “very low”.

While consumers think highly of using social media as a source of healthcare information, it is not the premiere source however when considering all options. Fifty percent of the respondents replied that healthcare provider websites are the preferred source of online healthcare information.

Results of the study also provided insight into who is using social media for healthcare information. They are affluent and young – with the average age 41 and household income of $75k plus.

As healthcare marketers this provides current, up to date evidence that in order to be influential in patients’ healthcare decisions, we must be present in their world.

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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Facebook is Getting Old!

March 31, 2011

People over the age of 65 are adopting Facebook faster than any other age group.

Social media is for young people.  Right?  Well yes but they are not the only ones.   Older people are becoming frequent users of social media.  At alarming rates.

People over 65 are the fastest growing demographic users of Facebook with over 6.5 million joining in May of 2010 alone.  And that is three times more than May of 2009.

Also surprising is the fact that the fastest growing demo on Match.com is adults over 50.  Now a total of over 4 million.  Men over 55 who have become members of Facebook since last fall has increased 138% and women over 55 has increased 175% over the same period.  And overall, 47% of 50-64 year-olds are using social media.  An 88% growth in the past year.

So what does this mean for healthcare marketers?  Social media is not just for the young.  Those older people, boomers, senior citizens who are frequent users of our healthcare system are very active on social media.  And the numbers continue to grow.  Exponentially.  Our paradigm about social networking needs to change to include older adults in our social media strategies.   Social media is beginning to show it’s age.  A much older age.

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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Why Aren’t We Seeing More Traditional and Social Media Integration?

March 30, 2011

Traditional and Social Media should be integrated, sure. How much has been written and said about integration of traditional and social media?  How often have we been told integration is essential and is the   true test of effective advertising today?  Most healthcare marketers have struggled with this and have wrestled with ways to integrate the two. Some of us have made attempts at it but generally we haven’t been that successful.

Well healthcare marketers aren’t the only ones.  Even on advertising’s largest stage, the Super Bowl, integration did not occur. With all the talk about the necessity of integration you would think Super Bowl spots would have been loaded with such.  But not so.  Basically the only integration was the listing of a website or Facebook URL.  That’s it.

Lightspeed Research indicated almost two-thirds of 18-34 year-olds planning to watch the Super bowl have smartphones and intended to use them during the game.   Of those, 59% were planning on sending emails or text messages about the game, while 18% planned on checking out ads on their phonies.  With over 106 million watching the game there was a tremendous opportunity to forge new relationships.  The opportunity was missed.

Ian Schafer in a recent article in Ad Age discussed the irony of the situation.   Brands who ran ads in the Super Bowl, looked to social media to gauge their audiences’ reaction.   They carefully monitored how many views the spots received on YouTube, checked what was tweeted about their ads and monitored Google alerts for mentions.   While depending on social media to tract reaction, they failed to integrate social networking into their ads. In fact, practically every ad could have been aired prior to Al Gore’s invention of the internet.

Part of the reason is that’s it’s difficult to integrate the two in :30 secs.  Especially when you are being judged for creativity.  It’s difficult to get high marks for creativity when you take precious seconds to integrate social media. You can make an impression in :30 seconds but it’s difficult to start a relationship much less build one.

Yes, we should explore ways to integrate social media and traditional media. But don’t be so discouraged because, as healthcare marketers, we haven’t done such a great job with it.  Despite all the talk, the largest, most powerful brands in the world generally haven’t mastered the art (or science) of it either which says marketers are still trying to discover effective methods of integration.  We all agree it’s what we need to do, but finding effective and creative ways to accomplish it isn’t easy. Especially when we are being graded on creativity, immediate impact and instant effectiveness.

So we are not the only ones who are struggling to find ways for successful integration.  The big boys are too.  We all have to watch and experiment and learn.  The talk of the “experts” is good.  Their philosophy makes perfectly good sense.  We all agree.  But it will take time and experimentation to do it in practice.


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Posted by Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Don’t Shortchange Your Hospital’s Positioning Statement

February 13, 2011

Brand positioning statements need to be simple and powerful.  But they also must connect emotionally.  The best ones always do.

What are some of the great positioning statements of all times?   I bet the ones you think of are not one-word slogans.  Most of them are longer, aren’t they?  And you remember them because they tell a story and they are long enough to connect with you emotionally. It seems brand positioning lines are getting shorter and shorter.  Like we have to boil it down to the fewest words possible.  But in doing that we often miss the emotional attachment.

Here are some classic brand positioning statements:

Fed Ex: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”

Smuckers: “With a name like Suckers , it’s got to be good”

Avis:  “Avis is number 2 in rental cars. So why go with us? We try harder”

Ace Hardware: “Ace is the place with the helpful hardware man”

New York Times: “All the news that’s fit to print”

M&M: “Melts in your mouth, not your hands”

Las Vegas: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”

Geico: “15 Minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance”

Secret deodorant: “Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”

The list could go on and on.  The thing that makes them great is they each tell a story and they connect emotionally.  Sure, all of them could have been shortened and probably communicated the message but they wouldn’t have been emotionally appealing and therefore would have been less memorable.

Imagine these:

Fed Ex: “The overnight company”

Smuckers: “It’s good”

Avis: “We try harder”

Ace Hardware: “The helpful people”

New York Times:  ”All the news”

M&M: “Not messy”

Well get the point?  The power of a brand positioning line is not it’s brevity, but it’s emotional attachment. It doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be long but it does have to connect.  “Just Do It” is not long but connects and there is therefore memorable.  The same can be said for “Diamond are forever” for DeBeers.

Compare the positioning statements of two coffees.  Maxwell House said “Good to the last drop” and had a strong market share. But Folgers with “ The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup” has grown to dominant Maxwell House.  There are lots of reasons for this but the emotional positioning of Folgers certainly paved the way.

Charmin leads the toilet paper category by using. Mr. Whipple to ask us to “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin.” The simple word like “please” makes that emotional attachment.  And even President Obama was smart by not just using “Change” as his positioning line but rather the much stronger, “Change we can believe in”

There are thousands of brand positioning lines but the ones we remember speak to both the rational and emotional sides of our brain.  The right and left side.  As healthcare marketers, we too must work really hard to appeal to our audiences both rationally and emotionally. That’s usually not done with a short one or two word positioning line.  It more often than not requires more words.  Words that tell a story and connect emotionally.  Words that speak to the heart as well as the mind.

Al Ries, Chairman of Ries & Ries, a marketing firm in Atlanta, wrote an article in Ad Age that cited many of these examples and made this point very strongly.  He concluded the article by writing, “When Abraham Lincoln was asked how long a man’s legs should be in proportion to his body, he replied, ‘they ought to be long enough to reach the ground.’  How long should a slogan be?  It should be long enough to reach an emotional connection in the consumer’s mind.”

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Posted by Jimmy Warren

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