Healthcare Digital Marketing

Healthcare Marketing: Digital Newspaper Ads Effective

Newspaper digital ads provide a strong reach and reader responsiveness.

Newspapers are struggling.  Circulation and ad revenues are down.   Some newspapers have stopped the presses or reduced their days of publication.  In response, and to adapt to changing consumers habits, newspapers have put an emphasis on digital content.  And research indicates their efforts are delivering results.

A study by Frank N Magid Associates  commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America found from a survey of 2,518 online interviews among adults 18+, 60% have looked at an online version of a newspaper from a laptop or desktop.  The study also found 25% has looked at a newspaper from a smartphone and 12% from a tablet.   Considering the overlap, 67% of the respondents fell into one or more of the three categories.

The original survey was followed by 1,179 online surveys and nine focus groups.  The research also found that 66% of digital newspaper media consumers said they act on digital ads displayed with newspaper content.  Additionally 61% of tablet users said they act on newspaper tablet ads and 59% of samrtphone users respond to ads.

Erik Sass referenced the study and reported in MediaDailyNews that 65% of adults ages 18-34, have read a newspaper on a computer in the last week compared to 48% of adults 65+.  And 41% of adults 18-34 read a newspaper on a smartphone, compared with 11% of adults 65+.

This is good news for healthcare marketers it gives some confidence there is an audience for digital newspaper and those readers are responsive to online ads.  This does not mean marketers can just take print ads and put them in a digital format.  It will require new creative strategies. And digital ads also will allow click thrus and more interaction with consumers.

The future of newspaper advertising will definitely be in digital formats and content. That too can be effective for healthcare marketers but will require different strategies and new creative approaches.

Healthcare Marketing: QR Codes Effective for Hospitals?

QR codes can be effective for healthcare marketing, but they have limitations.

They’re everywhere these days.  You see them often.  In magazines, newspaper ads, retail stores, on product packaging and in many unexpected places.  Quick Response Codes, better known as QR Codes, with the black and white patterned squares that can be scanned by a Smartphone to link to a web page, registration form, contact info, etc.  QR codes link print and the web and allows tracking of its use.  And they are becoming more and more prevalent.  Their use increased 1600% last year.

QR codes can be very effective, disseminating useful information to the consumer.  The code can provide additional information, show a video, provide a place to respond, offer surveys and many other creative uses.  QR codes have many positive attributes for healthcare marketers but also some limitations.  A listing of both are offered here:

Positive attributes

1.    Easy to create
2.    Basically free
3.    Can be printed on almost anything
4.    Can disseminate a large amount of information
5.    Provide information in a private setting

Limitations

1.    Not everyone has Smartphone…only 35% of population
2.    The linked website must be compatible with mobile platform
3.    Smartphone must be close to the QR code
4.    Phone must have the appropriate app to read the code

QR codes can be very successful for healthcare marketers.  But their use should be strategic.  It should fulfill a consumer need.  And it should be easy to use

Hospital Marketing: Making the Case for Mobile

The facts are overwhelming when considering whether your hospital should go mobile.  The small screen is the place to be.

An astonishing fact: there are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones but do not have electricity in their homes.  That shows the impact of mobile on our lives.  It’s estimated that the off-grid, on-net population will reach 138 million by 2015.

Ann Tracy Mueller posted on healthcarecommunications.com statistics showing the use of mobile is growing exponentially. Citing Kevin Roberts from a Cisco report in his Blogging Innovation site, the case is made for the impact of mobile and the need for healthcare marketers to be mobile-savvy and mobile-ready.

  • Global mobile traffic nearly tripled for the third year in a row in 2010.
  • Mobile video traffic will exceed 50 percent of all mobile data traffic for the first time in 2011.
  • In early 2010, iPhone use was at least four times higher than that of any other smart phone platform. By the end of 2010, iPhone use was only 1.75 times higher than that of number two, Android.
  • There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015, up 56-fold from 14 million at the end of 2010.
  • There will be more than 7.1 billion mobile-connected devices in 2015, roughly equivalent to the world’s population by then (7.2 billion).

The numbers are staggering.  But they are understandable.  Think how much you use your mobile device.  How much you see the people around you using there’s.  How many people do you know who don’t have a mobile phone?  Probably not many.  The numbers are clear.  The stats are obvious.

As healthcare marketers, in the very least, we need to make sure our internet presence is mobile-friendly.  And we should be exploring ways to create and use mobile apps to market our hospital.  Information is being accessed from mobile devices, including information about one’s health.  We must make sure our health information and information about our organization and services are easily mobile-accessible.

Not convinced yet?  Here’s one more bit of information from Roberts that should remove any doubt about the need for our hospital to be mobile-friendly:

“The average smartphone will generate 1.3 gigabytes of traffic per month in 2015, 16 times more than the 2010 average of 79 megabytes per month.  Growth in the next five years will see global mobile traffic reach 6.3 exabytes per month by 2015. How big is that? It’s been suggested that every word ever spoken by human beings would equate to five exabytes. So six every month is a lot of chatter!”

 

Healthcare Marketing: Younger Population Does Read Newspaper – Online

To fully reach the print audience, healthcare marketers must include an online component. Though not as easy as one might think.

Sixty-one percent of adults under 30 who read newspapers read it online.  Compared to just 39% who read a printed version.  Additionally the average income for those who read it online is 20% higher than those who read the printed version.   More astonishing is that adults under 30 who earn more than $100,000 annually are 82% more likely to read digital news content than print.

According to a survey of 5,034 households conducted by Pulse Research, online readers of newspapers are younger, more affluent and better educated.  The survey showed the average age of print readers is 51 compared to digital readers at 44.

Digital readers are 22% more likely to have a college education.  Additionally 48% of the digital readers have children at home compared to 32% of print readers.

While circulation of daily newspapers continues to decline, the print and online audience is substantial and desirable.   To penetrate the younger, more affluent, better-educated audience with print we must adopt an online strategy.

The chief problem with this for healthcare marketers is the options online are not nearly as attractive as those provided by newspaper print versions.  Traditional print offers good real estate, which can create impact and allow a brand to develop and tell a story.  Online options provide very little more than name recognition and a brand statement.  Until newspapers decide to offer significant space in their online content, newspaper advertising will continue to be less and less attractive.

Many marketers are shifting money away from newspapers because a significant portion of their audience is going online for the content, but offer limited advertising options for digital marketing.  Newspapers will have to address this issue as they provide little more than billboard advertising but with a much smaller reach and frequency.

 

 

 

 

 

Healthcare Marketing: 20% of Time Spent Online is with Social Networks

Social media sites reach 82% of the online population and Facebook reaches over ½ of the world’s population.

Social media continues to show amazing growth.  In “It’s A Social World”, ComScore has issued a report concerning the growth and impact of social media.  Without a doubt social media has become the most popular online activity.  In 2007 social media represented only 6% of online activity but that has now increased to 20%. Over 1.2 billion people globally use social media sites.

The report verified that women spend more than 30% more time online than men.  Social networking is no longer a young person’s activity as the participation now spans all age groups.   And Facebook now reaches 55 billion people, which is more than half of the world’s population.   Despite the hype for mobile access and marketing, it still captures just a fraction of the fixed-line connection.

The study just proves again the impact of social media.  The extensiveness of social networking.  But it does not answer, for healthcare marketers, the question of how to take full advantage of this massive audience.  Savvy healthcare marketers have experimented with some success.  But there are so many unanswered questions. We continue to learn and hopefully grow smarter.  But with limited resources and some of the limitations of healthcare marketing, it’s still a learning process.   There is still much to be explored as we attempt new tactics and new ideas.  Stay tuned….there will be much to come.

 

Healthcare Marketing: Ten Steps to Creating Effective Hospital Landing Pages

Improve your web marketing by utilizing landing pages that make engagement much easier.

In a recent issue of Ragan’s Health Care Communication News, Scott Bille contributed an article on how to create effective landing pages.  The article has some very useful information and is republished here:

Now that people are coming to your website, the next question most marketers ask is, “How can I make the site work harder for me?”

Take a look at these ideas.

1. Identify business goals.

Before you can figure out how to make a landing page work harder, ask yourself, “What was the business need behind the campaign?” Lead generation, patient education, engagement? Answering this will help define a call-to-action (CTA) to engage visitors on the landing page. It will also help you find effective ways to measure how well everything is working.

2. Define a target audience.

Your next question should be, “Who can help us achieve those goals?”

3. Develop marketing tactics.

Once you know whom you are targeting, you need to ask, “How can I get my message in front of them at decision-making time?” It may be that you have a few targeted messages for subsets of the audience. This leads to another vital piece of this step—setting up a plan for reporting on individual tactics (messages, creative and placements).

4. Drive visitors to unique landing pages.

Sure, when someone clicks a link in one of those places, you could send them to the home page and they should be able to find the desired content. But why make them work that hard? You have a specific message—why not send them to a landing page focused on that message?

Now the fun begins. How can we make the landing page convert visitors into action-takers?

5. Deliver on off-page promises.

Since you built the marketing campaign driving traffic to the landing pages, you know what visitors were reading immediately before they arrived. Your page title, URL, headlines and body copy should all relate directly to the message that got someone to the landing page.

This will help them quickly realize that they are in the right place and prevent high bounce rates (people leaving the page without taking any action). It will also boost your quality score for pay-per-click (PPC) ads like Google AdWords, which could save you money on your ad bids.

6. Don’t make visitors think.

Keep the message on the page focused and simple. Eliminate distractions (too many choices, navigation to the rest of your site, etc.). Create a bright shiny and irresistible call-to-action.

If visitors came from an email, chances are you might know some of their personal info. Talk to your IT team to find out if they can pre-populate the form fields in the landing page’s CTA. At AB&C, we have had conversion rates of more than 50 percent by pre-populating form content.

7. Build trust.

Bounces can be caused by failure to establish trust. Web surfers are a savvy bunch and will bail out of any site that feels like a spam trap created to get their personal info.

When visitors hit your landing page, you need to assure them that they arrived at a legitimate destination. Tell them where they are. Show your contact information, accreditations, awards, etc. to help create a sense of authenticity.

Avoid over-use of capitalization and punctuation. “AMAZING!!!” Or “NEW!!!” Might as well read “SPAM TRAP!!!” “RUN AWAY!!!”

8. Optimize Call To Action.

OK, you have identified the right people, driven them to the landing page, given them a concise message. Now, how do you get them to take action? On the web, it’s often a lead-generation form. Here are some tips to make that form process simple for your visitors.

  • Outline the benefits: Let visitors know why they should fill out the form. What’s in it for them?
    • Keep it short and simple: I always start by asking, “What fields can we remove from that form?” If you don’t have an immediate use for every piece of information you’re asking for, remove them. More importantly, remove any field that might make visitors ask, “Why would they want that?”
    • Create a simple scan line: Line up fields and titles to keep the user from having to jump around to understand the form. This will help even complex forms to feel less daunting.
      • Make the form easy to read: Make the type large enough for your target audience to easily see (the older the audience, the larger the font size).
      • Don’t skimp on white space: Let your form have room to breathe. It will make it less intimidating.
      • Identify required fields: This shouldn’t be necessary if you have done your job in eliminating unnecessary fields. But, if only some of the fields are mandatory, mark them.
      • Inline validation: Don’t make visitors hit the submit button before they find out that they didn’t enter a valid email, or they skipped a required field

9. Measure results.

If you are using Google Analytics and have properly tagged all inbound links, it should be fairly easy to see what tactics are driving the best traffic. Look at how many people hit the site versus the number of completed actions. Now, ask yourself, “What can I do to get more people to convert?

10. Test, test, test.

Try some variations to the page to see how they affect conversion rates. Fight the urge to test multiple variations the same time. If you do, how will you know which one made the difference? Run A/B tests to two variations; observe and refine as you learn from visitor responses. Here are some variables to throw into your A/B testing.

  • Headlines
    • Graphics and other images
    • Multiple CTAs: Some people will click the first shiny object. Others may read through your content before deciding to get involved. Make sure that second category doesn’t have to hunt back up the page to find your CTA. Sometimes a secondary CTA could work for someone who isn’t fully committed
    • Button colors: Try colors that blend with the page’s palette, and colors that contrast. There is no perfect formula. Some say that green means “go” and red means “stop.” Others say red evokes a strong emotional response. Some say blue is the standard link color, so use that for buttons. Whatever color you choose, make sure it looks “clickable.”
    • Button text: Label your button something that ties in to your CTA like “Request an Appointment” or “Apply Now.” Avoid labels like “Submit” or “Go.”
    • Form variations: Try your full form. Then, try simply asking for a name and email. Somewhere in between lies the perfect blend that doesn’t scare people away, but still gives your staff the info they need to follow up.

 

Scott Bille is the interactive director at Aloysius Butler and Clark.

 

 

Healthcare Marketing: Are Your Internet Ads Ignored?

Research shows Americans ignore internet ads more than advertising in any other medium.

The old adage that “half of my advertising budget is wasted, now if I only knew which half” appears to have a lot of merit. Especially with internet ads.  Research produced by Adweek/Harris Poll from an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive indicates that:

  • 63% of Americans ignore or disregard internet ads.
  • 43% say they don’t pay attention to banner ads.
  • 20% ignore search ads.  

For hospital marketers, those are significant numbers.

Wayne Friedman reported the findings in MediaPostNews.  Other media compared to the internet faired much better.  Only 14% ignore television ads, 7% for radio and 6% for newspaper.  Probably not surprising, 91% of consumers ignore some of the ads they see.

Even out of the largest users of the internet, adults 18-34, 40% of them state they ignore internet banner ads.  And of those consumers who have some college education or a college degree, 46% ignore banner ads compared to just 40% of those with a high school diploma or less. There was practically no difference between men and women.

So for healthcare marketers maybe we shouldn’t rush out and totally embrace internet advertising and shift significant amounts of money away from traditional media.  Some voices are constantly telling us that our budgets are out of whack because the percentage we spend on internet advertising is typically far below the percentage of our audience who are regularly on the internet.

Sure, we should have an internet presence and take advantage of opportunities of reaching and engaging our target audience.  But the number of people using the web is not the only factor to consider.  Research is indicating that it’s harder to break through the clutter and gain traction with internet advertising than with traditional mediums. 

Internet advertising is viable and should be in the media mix but it’s certainly not time to abandon traditional mediums for the web.   Internet advertising and social media are the new kids on the block.   But the old standbys aren’t dead yet.  In fact, this research indicates less of our advertising on traditional mediums is not as wasted as much as advertising on the internet.  But of course for each medium, we are still stuck with the question: which part is wasted and which is effective?

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Healthcare Advertising: Consumers Internet Time Now Equals TV Time

Overall, adults spend as much time on the internet as they do watching TV while younger adults spend more time on the web than TV. 

For the first time, the amount of time adults spend on the internet and spend watching TV is equal  –  13 hours each per week.  Forrester recently conducted the survey and published the results.  Brian Morrissey reported in Adweek that research has already indicated younger adults (18-30) already spend more time on the web than watching TV and now it’s true of 31-44 year olds too.

The losers in the survey were radio (down 15%), magazines (down 18%) and newspapers (down 26%). Continuing the trend of the last few years.

So for healthcare marketers, that begs the question if an equal amount of your advertising budget should be allotted to the web as to TV.  Some argue the percentages of ad spend are way out of line and marketers are hanging on to better known traditional media way too much.  And there is a tremendous opportunity for those who align their budgets to actual consumer habits.

Others argue in contrast, that television is still the most effective way to build and sustain a brand and that web advertising does not have the impact of television.

As Morrissey stated, one important factor to remember is that over a third of the hours consumers spend on the web are work related while practically all the time watching TV is for leisure and entertainment.

It is obviously true that adults are spending more time on the web and that time is now equal to the time they spend watching TV.  But I’m not sure it’s time yet to spend as much of our scarce budget on web advertising as television.  Television continues to prove that it is extremely effective building a brand.   And when people watch TV they are truly engaged – and actually watching TV.  But while they are on the internet, they are often at work or may be searching for specific information with restricts their attention to web advertising.  They are more often “on a mission” when they are on the internet than when they are watching TV and thus less likely to notice ads.  Sure, one can rightfully argue that people can leave the room or tune out the TV when there are breaks in programming.  But research indicates that happens much less often than assumed.

For healthcare marketers, it’s important we take advantage of the opportunities available on the web.  And as consumers spend more time on the web, it becomes even more important.  It also seems logical to take some of the budget from mediums that are declining in audience share to accomplish this.  But the time spent watching television has remained stable over the past 5 years and therefore it remains an extremely viable media option.

It’s an argument that will continue and healthcare marketers will continue to experiment to determine the media mix that is most effective.

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Hospital Marketing: An Ad is an Ad is an Ad, Right?

Placement of web ads greatly influences effectiveness.

Ads that appear on the first screen of a user’s browser window above the fold have been found to be most effective.  Research by Casale Media has shown that ads above-the fold can be seven times more effective at generating click-through than ads below the fold.

Casale analyzed nearly 2 billion ad impressions and found that users were three to four times more likely to act on an ad if it is the first or second ad they see during their session.   As the consumer continues to browse, ad effectiveness continues to diminish.

As reported in Media Post, repetition is proven to increase effectiveness. Ads seen five times or more by a consumer were 12 to 14 times more effective than ads seen less than five times.

The research also indicated that ads appearing on cluttered sites lose effectiveness.  Ads surrounded by photo galleries or clusters of other ads were much less effective.  And ads may not be seen at all when displayed on a web site that uses auto-refresh mechanisms to inflate impressions.

As hospital marketers we have long known the importance of ad placement.  We are careful which radio stations to buy and what time periods.  We buy the most watched or most cost effective television programming.  We buy specific placement in magazines. We ride outdoor locations to choose the very best addresses. And we often complain about the placement of our ads in the newspaper.

But many times in placing our hospital’s adverting on websites we have been much less particular.   That is partially because we have not known much about ad placement and the ad effectiveness on the web.   We have had our intuitions but research like the kind conducted by Casale is beginning to give us the reliable information we’ve needed.  And what we are finding is ad placement on the web is just as critical for effectiveness as every other medium.

So as hospital marketers increasingly utilize web advertising it’s important to know where the ad will be seen and in what type of environment.  There are many websites with lots of traffic but designed in such a way that makes the ads placed on the site much less effective than sites with less traffic.

And it’s still true that frequency matters.  Repetition and frequency is just as important on the internet as it is in other mediums.  It’s only effective if we commit enough to make sure it is seen and seen often.

 

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