Overcoming Four Social Media Challenges for Cardiovascular Marketers

While social media is gaining favor among cardiovascular marketers, we’re also being held more accountable for results.

I recently saw a post from Lee Odden that has some good advice for addressing four key challenges.

1. Getting Approval From the C-Suite

• Tying efforts to business goals, e.g., revenue growth, patient acquisition or increased profitability is key.
• The days of approaching social media marketing as a series of disconnected campaigns without coordination, overall strategy or specific outcomes is over. It’s time to start applying the same strategy to social media campaigns that we use in more traditional campaigns.
• Start with a hypothesis and develop a plan for reaching or influencing business outcomes. Show key performance indicator measurements and to what degree they can correlate with goals.

2. Social Content Creation

• Creating an editorial plan, similar to an editorial calendar for a publication, can save a lot of time with content creation.
• Developing content formats or templates as well as libraries of keywords, hooks & clever angles that support key messages and desired reader behaviors can save time when you need a quantity of quality content.
• Leveraging other people in your organization, especially subject matter experts, physicians, clinical trial administrators, dieticians, etc., can also save time. People who interact with patients are a goldmine for quality content ideas.

3.  Finding / Reaching Your Audience

• Collect information that exemplifies your best patients and prospects.  Discover their information discovery, consumption and sharing preferences. What topics are they interested in? What are their pain points? What do they search for? What do they talk about on social media sites? Where do they hang out and who / what influences them?

Odden recommends taking a prospect newsletter email list and leveraging it with a service like Rapleaf or Flowtown. Importing email addresses into those services will reveal wherever those individuals have registered accounts on social media sites.

4.  Presenting Results to the C-Suite

Odden acknowledges that executive level social media reporting to the C-Suite is still a bit of a challenge because they most often care about the direct impact on business growth – something that is difficult to measure with social media efforts due to the indirect influence and delayed effect.

However, correlation measures can be offered, such as an overlay of the progression of social media performance indicators on top of business goals.

For example:

• The increased trend in social content creation and citations from the community overlaid with an increase in non-campaign new prospect inquiries.

The key with C-Suite reporting is to properly manage expectations, keep it simple and do your best to focus on both the direct and indirect impact of social media efforts on overall business goals.

The bottom line is that social media planning and evaluation has to meet the same standard that we employ for other marketing communications programs.  I’ve said it a million times.  Social media is just one more tool in our toolbox.  I have a feeling it will be working harder than ever this year.

10 Questions to Gauge Success of Cardiovascular Social Media Efforts

Setting realistic goals for social media requires a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications

Here are a few key suggestions from Lee Odden of TopRank online marketing blog of questions you should ask to generate better results from your social media strategy:

1. What goals do you hope to achieve from a social media marketing effort? What does success REALLY look like short and long term? Look at specific segments or service lines, not just your organization as a whole.
2. Are web and social media synced? How will current web analytics and other digital performance reporting interact with social media marketing analysis?
3. What measures of success will be used? How are you defining ROI?
4. Is there a strategic plan for coordinating and measuring social media efforts across the organization? Will these efforts work together or in silos?
5. What are current measures? Are you conducting a formal effort at monitoring social channels using a social media monitoring/analysis software application?
6. Where to start? Is there a particular service line or product that can serve as a test case?
7. What’s the current tactical mix? Assess current social media activities: How long has the company participated with social media sites and which ones are you using? Identify benchmark measurements.
8. Is a dashboard and social media marketing management tool used for content promotion?
9. Moving forward, what will it take to transition from fragmented efforts to something more coordinated?
10. Is there an internal social media council or group tasked with assessing social media strategy?  How will their role affect defining goals and ongoing performance reporting?

There are some good reminders here that we’ll be using with our clients as planning for 2011 gets underway.

Measuring Cardiovascular Marketing Efforts: Social Media vs. Advertising

In order to prove the value of social media, it’s important to understand how it differs from traditional advertising.

If you’re like most of our clients, you’ve already moved into the social media arena.  But now, you may be getting questions from your CEO about how it’s working.  Or you may be trying to decide if you’re allocating the appropriate resources to social media.   How can you know if it’s really working?

We’ve been talking to our clients about moving beyond traditional advertising metrics to think about how social media measurement is different.

I recently read a post by Katie Saffey that features a side-by-side comparison and offers a good starting point for social media measurement.

Engagement vs. impressions

Social media success relies on engagement vs. advertising’s traditional number of impressions.  The ability to engage one-on-one with your audience can allow you to deliver customized messages that speak directly to an individual’s concerns.

Quality vs. Quantity

With traditional advertising, we often measure reach.  With social media, it’s more important to think about the quality of each individual interaction.

Constant vs. Sporadic

While traditional advertising often uses a “flighted” strategy, it’s important for social media communications to be ongoing and consistent every day.

Reputation management

Social media allows you to monitor what people are saying about your brand, and you can participate in the conversation in an authentic, relevant way.
As Safrey points out, “Words such as engagement and conversation do not get you off the hook for providing real numbers” in measuring social media results.

If you’re not tracking links, click-throughs and other Web analytics, that’s an important first step.  There are many free tools out there to help you get started.

Does Physician Involvement in Social Media Pose a Threat to Cardiovascular Marketing?

Physicians’ online activity is on the rise.

• In a recent study by Google, 86% of U.S. physicians said they use the Internet to gather health, medical or prescription drug information.
• They’ve joined the social networking revolution too. According to a survey by Mediamix International, 34% of physicians now use social media.

For the most part, I’m excited by these statistics.   Most of the heart and vascular marketers I know have been trying to encourage physician involvement in online activities for a long time.

But is there a downside?

I’ve been hearing a few horror stories lately.

• A marketing director friend recently told me about a patient who appeared at a cardiologist’s office without an appointment.  When the office staff politely told him that he must have his dates mixed up, the patient said, “Oh no, I’m supposed to be here.  I’ve been chatting with Dr. Jones on Facebook, and he told me to stop by.”
• Cases of doctors being sued for giving online advice in venues such as Facebook are also starting to surface.

Should these fears discourage marketers from involving physicians in social media efforts?

I hope not.

Physician and staff involvement adds credibility and knowledge that is hard to find in other sources. Online physician discussions offer amazing opportunities for both patient acquisition and retention.

But, it’s important to use common sense.

American Medical News recently published a post by Arthur R. Derse, MD, on this subject in its ethics forum.

I plan to share this with some of our clients as we plan for future campaigns.   I think it offers some great reminders that communications must be HIPAA compliant and that they should avoid giving specific advice to individual patients.

As Dr. Derse says, the bottom line is that online physician involvement in social networks should begin with the tweetable Hippocratic aphorism, “First, do no harm.”

Put Your Cardiovascular Marketing on “ROIDs.”

Cardiovascular marketers should put their programs on “ROIDS,” a performance-enhancement recipe to get better results for their efforts.

This time of year at my house brings lots of discussion about baseball – spring training, anticipation of opening day and  numerous updates from my 13-year-old son about the prospects for various players.

Recently, a hot topic has been Mark McGwire’s admission that he used steroids.  As a responsible parent, I’ve certainly expressed the appropriate outrage at both his drug usage and his lying.  However, as many a statistician has noted, his performance enhancers worked.

More than a few clients tell me they’re looking for a recipe to enhance their cardiovascular marketing programs as we all wait for economic recovery to kick into a higher gear.

Dick Patton, Harvard Business Review, says that marketers should put their programs on “ROIDs,” a performance-enhancement program of the non-pharmaceutical variety.  He’s a devised an acronym that highlights the approach:

•       Responsibility marketing

•       Organizational leadership

•       Insights about Customers

•       Digital Marketing

Patton says that two of the elements — responsibility marketing and digital marketing — are being driven by consumers. I agree.

Consumers are demanding higher standards from businesses of all kinds, including healthcare providers.  As marketers of cardiovascular services, we’re in a unique position to provide quality and outcome data that adds credibility and appeal.  How are you currently using that data in prospective patient messaging?

Furthermore, are you using digital channels to deliver your messaging in the most effective ways?   Cardiovascular patients and families are prime candidates to participate in online communities that guide them through the myriad steps of diagnosis, treatment, recovery and lifestyle considerations.

Patton asserts that the other two elements — organizational leadership and insights about consumers — are operating principles.

Marketing executives must work along all points of the value chain throughout the product or service lifecycle and anywhere the consumer comes in contact with the brand.

When is the last time you sat down with the your entire cardiovascular team – from the physicians to the nurses to housekeeping personnel – to talk about their role in your hospital’s value proposition?

One of my favorite cardiologists loves to meet with housekeeping staff.  He makes them feel like heroes by stressing the importance of their role in contributing to positive surgical outcomes because their efforts are critical in preventing infection.

Finally, gathering patient insights that are far deeper than data gathered in traditional market research can seem daunting.  However, opportunities abound to take advantage of new Web analytic technologies that glean relevant information about both customer behavior and social dynamics among patients and their families/caregivers.

Based on the challenges I see our clients facing every day, I think these seem like smart principles.   Maybe trying “ROIDs” is a good way to build up your marketing muscle.