All posts in Social Media Marketing

Patient engagement via social media and digital marketing are vital for growing medical practices, says health care marketing consultant Jennifer Dally, of Attune Marketing Group in Powell, Ohio.

Speaking at the 2018 annual meeting of the Large Urology Group Practice Association, Dally said the physician-patient relationship is about more than diagnosis and treatment. What patients want most is connection, which “brings peace of mind.” Transparency, active listening, trust, convenience, customer service, and good communication are among the attributes that patients say establish connection, Dally says.

“We expect a certain level of experience in general as a consumer, and that has translated into the health care world as well,” she says.

Attempts to improve the patient experience can be simple. For example, Dally says, when physicians wrap up a patient visit, they can say to a patient, “Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

Physicians need to understand that patients already have been on a medical journey before a medical encounter. “I’m trying to give them context of the journey patients take before they arrive at their practice and what could they do to influence that journey.”

She emphasizes 4 essentials for every medical practice: a website; search business listings; social media engagement; and review management. A website must consider patients’ needs, not those of the practice. All websites should enable patients to pay bills online and to schedule appointments, as well as provide a link to a patient portal, she says. Website content should be produced with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. The goal is to have a website rank high on search engine results pages. This determines how patients or physicians find a practice “in the digital landscape,” Dally says. High Google rankings matter a lot, she says.

Read more: Social Media, Digital Marketing Key to Building Medical Practices

There’s no doubt social media has become an important channel for business growth. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 68% of U.S. adults are Facebook users and more than half of U.S. adults use the platform several times a day.

Most Americans also rely on social media to shop and inform themselves about products and services, including mortgages. The problem is relatively few credit unions are fully taking advantage of this trend. They may have social media accounts, but many fail to leverage these platforms to create targeted messaging to cultivate members for life.

Read more: 3 Keys to Successful Social Media Marketing

Humans are visual creatures. Half of the human brain is designed to process visuals, more than the other senses such as touch and hearing. The brain is able to identify images in as fast as 13 milliseconds, and humans are able to remember more than 2000 pictures with at least 90% accuracy. So if someone sees a beautiful or a haunting image, they’ll won’t likely forget it.

In the age of social media, a picture is truly worth a thousand words. If you want to stand out, you must have really compelling visuals in your arsenal. Online consumers are said to retain only 10% to 20% of information, but when plain text is paired with visuals, they are able to remember 65% of the information. Another study revealed that content with photos or infographics registered a 94% increase in page views compared to non-visual content.

With billions of social media content out there, it is important that as marketers and content producers you are able to draw attention to your social media images, or people are going to forget about you.

Here are the best practices for visual content to get you started on improving the overall look and feel of your social media channels.

Use dynamic colour schemes
Using key colours that enable consumers to easily identify your brand or company is great, but that doesn’t mean you are stuck with blues or reds. Colours convey not just your logo, but also warmth and emotion. They set the mood and the atmosphere. While key colours help make branding more consistent, you don’t want to risk being too predictable.

A study on the impact of colour marketing found that 90% of snap judgements are made based on colour alone. This shows just how important colour is in social media design.

Instead of the flat colours, use light and dark gradients for a more unique feel. Evaluate whether you should go bold and bright or a little subdued. The key here is to be dynamic, allowing your brand to surprise even your most loyal fans. In order to get someone’s attention on social media, you must always keep it fresh and relevant. Keep your visual content consistent and exciting, and let your choice of colours do the trick for you.

Read more: 5 ways to enhance your marketing images on social media

Only a handful of technologies could measure up to the internet in terms of the impact it had on the way small companies operate. All of a sudden, the majority of these locally-operating businesses were transported onto the global market, where they now had to struggle for survival against others of their kind.

Luckily, the world wide web has also given these companies a some new of means of dealing with this new competitive environment. Among the tools at their disposal, social networks are the ones that are seeing the most use. Companies of all sizes utilize social media to enhance their online standing in a number of ways, allowing them to acquire a more significant share of the market.

Not all companies have managed to leverage the power of social media to their advantage. Usually, this is due to limitations in terms of time, staff, and resources that are common among small businesses. With that being said, even a small business operation can find a way to utilize social media in their favor.

If you want to know more about this topic, you can scroll down and check out our short guide on social media marketing basics for small business.

How to Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy
One of the main selling points of social media is the relative ease with which you can get an account up and running. Social media has been a mainstay of internet culture for a while now – I would be hard-pressed to find a person who hasn’t used an account on some social network at some point in their life. While this kind of knowledge is certainly a useful place to start, it is not sufficient for running a social media campaign for a business.

In order to use social media marketing for business, you first need to develop a strategy. Doing so involves figuring out what you hope to accomplish by promoting your business on social media. For instance, you might want to improve the conversion rate of your landing pages, increase overall website traffic, strengthen your brand, or get in touch with your most loyal customers.

Read more: Social Media Marketing for Small Business: What You Need to Know?

Thousands of years ago, clans gathered around fires to share their day’s experiences and to tell stories that established group norms and shaped social organization. Today, the fire’s embers have been replaced by the glow of internet-connected devices, but the communal exchange of stories and perspectives remains a fundamental force in social development.

From a business standpoint, a few important differences emerge from this evolution. Social media users can now publicly discuss their experiences with brands or products, forming large coalitions of interest that exert vast social pressure on brands and other organizations. From the presidential election to the newest cereal, everything is now a matter of public interest.

The essential principle, however, of shaping our world by sharing stories remains the same. The connections we build with others around us are the infrastructure of social change. Understanding how these connections are formed on social media, the purpose of these connections and how they can be leveraged is foundational to social media marketing.

Read more: Winning the social media marketing game

Did you know that 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others?

Not long ago, businesses would focus on newspapers and advertising through print. They still do, but clearly, digital media has taken over a major share of the branding budget in 2018. Now with smartphones and social media technology, businesses prefer to surf the tide of customer service using new-age marketing technologies. Social Media Marketing clearly demonstrates how technology amplifies brand messaging and meets new benchmarks in customer service benchmarks.

B2B marketing insights incorporated in social media are effective methods for traffic generation, interactive engagement and brand association.

• IBM Watson worked with the US open to deliver real-time insights on Instagram of new engagements and experiences for millions of online fans. Customers form associations with the event and the brand, thus being an effective real-time marketing scenario.
• A video is often named as the tool which has helped gain traffic in various areas of businesses. In the area of video marketing for B2B marketing efforts, 97% of marketers believe that videos have helped increase user understanding of a certain product/service.
• Real-time responsiveness plays a critical role in customer experience. A great example of this is the Facebook page of Bluehost. Bluehost is one of the leading web hosting services company and boasts of a strong social media presence. The unrelenting efforts of their social media team provide opportunities to the brand in coordinating with their audience on real-time concepts.

Read more: Insights on Social Media Marketing: Scoop the Best for B2B Marketing 

Social media marketing has immense potential in the areas of customer engagement, lead generation and sales. Using social networks, you can not only identify new customers, but also engage your current customers and expand their customer lifecycles. Yet, few social media marketers ever boast of having experienced these benefits. Why? Pain-points. Here are 3 major pain-points that you probably continue to experience and how to fix them permanently.

1. Securing resources and time

According to an eMarketer survey, 46% enterprise companies find securing internal resources extremely challenging. That’s not very surprising. When was the last time you asked your boss to hire an extra hand for social media marketing? If it wasn’t too long ago, you’ll remember the sting of being turned down after ineffectively sharing your workload issues. Everyone assumes that social media managers simply tweet. Why should any company need more than one of those employees?

Solution

The simplest solution to this problem? Subscribe to a reliable social media management tool. Choose one that automates/organizes your most time-consuming tasks, so you can make room for tasks that actually contribute to your goals. Here are a few great examples of tools.

DrumUp for social media and content marketing

Using DrumUp, which a social media manager tool, you can schedule social media posts in advance, store drafts/completed ideas in organized folders, schedule across multiple accounts, curate content that your audience will appreciate, automate content sharing from RSS feeds (of your blog or interesting websites) and automate content sharing from libraries or pre-filled folders of your best evergreen content.

Canva for easy social media graphic designing

Using Canva, which is a graph designing tool, you can choose from optimized templates for sharing graphics on different social platforms. The tool also stocks templates for infographics, blog graphics, and so many other purposes, so you design-time is significantly reduced. If you have standard colors and fonts for your brand, you can also save your work on Canva and reuse the same templates to create quick social media graphics.

Read more at https://www.business2community.com/marketing/how-to-solve-3-major-social-media-marketing-pain-points-that-continue-to-exist-02079682

Read more: How to Solve 3 Major Social Media Marketing Pain-Points That Continue to Exist

Social media is one of the most effective marketing channels for companies of any size. In fact, it works so well that more than half of U.S. small businesses are planning to increase their social media marketing budget this year.

Generation Z is at the forefront of social media — they are extremely active on social networks, with half of Gen Z connected online via their smartphones for approximately 10 hours per day. This generation loves personalized apps, and a poll from SCG notes that 88% of Gen Zers are primarily using Instagram and Snapchat. Because of the new ways in which Gen Z is using social media, they’re changing the outlets associated with these platforms as well, with music at the forefront.

Fabrizio Moreira, founder of recording company VIP Music Records, understands the marketing punch social media can deliver, when executed correctly. The company is expanding rapidly, and recently inked a long-term contract with The Orchard, a division of Sony Music.

However, their primary focus has been Latin America, where they now hold the top spot for music distribution in the youth market. As a global study by Nielsen notes, listening to music is a primary source of Generation Z’s entertainment, with 37% of respondents stating it was top choice. This suggests Moreira is on his way to making his label a household name across the globe.

The fast growth of Moreira’s recording company and the success of its artists is a result of several factors, with a solid social media marketing strategy leading the way. I recently spoke with Moreira, and asked him for his top social media marketing tips for Gen Zers.

1. Test Multiple Social Platforms

According to Moreira, you aren’t going to know which social networks will provide value unless you test them. He says, “You have to think like your target customer, and determine what networks they are more than likely to be active on. Then you need to become active and put out a serious effort. It’s not something you can just play with for a day or two and expect to have a concrete answer.”

Read more: 4 Social Media Marketing Tips Gen Zers Should Learn 

Social media can be a powerful tool for brand promotion and consumer connection, but what happens when buzz goes bad?

Many businesses and marketers have suffered damage from a social media mistake. These gaffes can happen to any organization at any time, especially because social media is still unfamiliar to many.

A marketer or organization might have the best intentions, but too many simply don’t understand how to make the most of a social media presence and platform. As a result, they jump into social media and wind up with a marketing mess. The best way to avoid these fiascos is to be aware of the digital don’ts—before it’s too late.

To help you avoid backlash with your social media marketing, consider these top seven social media mistakes that you can’t afford to make:

1. Assuming social media marketing is free
Joining an online network might itself cost nothing, but an effective social media strategy demands at least a small investment or it will be a waste of time. Because online platforms don’t prioritize business posts in news feeds, these messages are often buried beneath a slew of others. As a result, it’s impossible for marketers to ensure their posts are seen.

It helps to spend a little money to broaden a company’s social media reach and target specific audiences. Even though this might call for a small investment, it’s likely to have a big payoff in online exposure and engagement.

2. Spending time and money on the wrong social platforms
With so many established and emerging social media platforms today, it can be hard to know which channels are best for engaging the target audience. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a business to waste a lot of time and money on the wrong social platforms. This social media mix-up could be due to incorrect audience research or a prior marketing mistake, but it can cost a company a great deal of effort and expense.

Read more: 7 costly social media marketing mistakes 

As social media marketing enters a level of unprecedented maturity, communicators who use it as a tool in their arsenal are starting to realize its benefit as a true revenue generator.

Most social networks tend to curb the reach and influence a post can have if it is not promoted (i.e. paid for), but that hasn’t stopped brand managers from finding ways to take advantage of these platforms and find new ways to turn social media storytelling into dollars.

A new infographic from MDG Advertising provides an eight-point checklist of the steps you should take to turn your social media marketing into profit. Those steps include:

1. Strategy

2. Auditing

3. Technology

4. Paid Media

5. Content Development

6. Customer Response

7. Compliance & Risk Management

8. Measurement

When a brand manager can master all these aspects of social media marketing simultaneously, success (and profit) becomes easily achievable. However, be aware that as soon as you master these steps, a new crop of best practices will probably spring up.

Get details on each of the eight steps to social media profitability in the infographic below:

Read more: 8 ways it pays to build social media marketing campaigns