GDPR to make marketing data scarcer — but also better

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is almost here, and concerns about how it will affect the supply of data used in marketing are palpable. The regulation will likely not impact all data in the same way, however.

The amount of first-party data — that which companies collect themselves — may decrease as people exercise their right to keep tighter control of their personal data.

Second-party data — basically first-party data obtained secondhand — may actually increase in availability (if not volume) due to the fact that there will be less of the other kinds of data available.

Third-party data — any data received through outside sources — is also likely to decrease; however, what remains is likely to be of higher quality.

Europe’s tighter regulations could lead to real improvement in the quality of third party data.

Movéo insight:

GDPR’s biggest impact will be on third-party data. Even though $20 billion was spent on it in 2017 in the U.S. alone, it is often unreliable. When running a programmatic campaign, for example, a lot of optimization is needed due to the integrity of the data. Europe’s tighter regulations, which are likely to be emulated worldwide, could lead to real improvement in the quality of third-party data. On the negative side, scarcer, better data will cost more.

3 steps to create healthcare content that resonates

Content has never been more important, in healthcare or in any industry. Consumers are devouring more of it than ever, across more channels. That’s great news for marketers: as DemandMetric reports, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, and generates about three times as many leads.

Most healthcare organizations are already adapting to this new reality. According to True North, 84.6% rank content marketing as a medium or high priority.

However, it’s one thing to prioritize content, another thing to manage it effectively. The Content Marketing Institute reports that only 35% of companies have a documented content strategy. A strategy provides a framework for how your team will approach planning, creating, and sharing content. It’s the how behind content marketing, and without it, marketers can face serious setbacks.

Without a shared strategic goal, it’s easy for various stakeholders to end up producing content in a vacuum. This often results in redundancy, conflicting messages, or missed opportunities to synchronize across service lines. An effective content strategy helps everyone work together toward the same goal — resulting in more useful, effective content marketing.

A three-phase process can help you put such a strategy in place:

1. Assess

The first step of successful content is to know who you’re targeting. Use both qualitative and quantitative research to profile your audience, such as focus groups, buyer personas, or social listening. This helps reveal consumers’ needs, as well as what content mix will suit their preferences. Of course, your ideal mix will vary based on your audience, but there are some industry-wide trends to consider. True North reports that the five most common healthcare content formats in 2017 were social media, website articles, video, eNewsletters, and blogs.

Next, a content audit will help determine whether your existing assets meet consumers’ needs. Ideally, content should reach consumers at every stage of the funnel — from awareness to conversion. Many healthcare organizations produce plenty of awareness-focused content, but few lower-funnel assets that can engage and nurture prospects into patients. If your audit reveals similar gaps, emphasizing conversion may be in your best interest.

2. Strategize

After exploring what your audience wants from your content, it’s time to decide what you want. What’s your content marketing goal: brand awareness, patient volume, retention, referrals, or something else? Setting a strategic priority is key to ensure all tactics are aligned for maximum impact.

Of course, your internal priorities can’t be developed in isolation. Truly successful content marketing is equally focused on your goals and your audience’s goals. In the strategizing phase, your objective is to develop an approach that speaks to both at once.

3. Plan

The final phase is when it’s time to get tactical. How will your content be produced? Do you plan to create all content in-house, partner with a third party, or aggregate other creators’ content? And, of course, what will your content be about?

For many healthcare organizations, selecting resonant topics can seem overwhelming. However, it doesn’t have to be. One smart place to start is in your web analytics. Your top-performing blogs, social media posts, or web content indicate topics your audience is interested in. Expanding upon them can help you stay relevant and top of mind.

Successful healthcare content marketing isn’t just about volume. It requires content that spans the entire funnel, ladders up to a strategic goal, and speaks to the unique needs of your audience. Organizations that understand this — and construct a strategy to achieve it — are in the ideal position to succeed.

Need help getting your content strategy off the ground? Movéo’s decades of healthcare expertise and strategic insight can help you construct a framework that elevates your content marketing efforts. Contact us to get started.

The (Amazon) Prime directive for healthcare

The recent disruptive foray by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase into healthcare seemed to catch people by surprise. After its announcement, shares of CVS Health took a nosedive, along with those of other healthcare giants such as UnitedHealth Group and Anthem.

While the particular combination of three companies involved (for now limiting themselves to improving their own employees’ healthcare) might have been difficult to divine, certainly Amazon’s participation was the least surprising thing about it. The company has been foreshadowing its move into healthcare for some time now.

Amazon already sells medical devices and employs executives to deal with healthcare-related regulatory issues. It now sells an exclusive line of over-the-counter medications and healthcare items. Some have speculated it may make an offline pharmacy play — the same way it did with grocer Whole Foods. Stay tuned on that one.

Amazon’s interest in healthcare is obvious because the company wants more of what’s in everyone’s wallet. In 2016, $10,348 per person was spent in the U.S. on healthcare, and Amazon clearly has eyes on its fair (or unfair) share of that number. But there is likely another reason healthcare might look like a very ripe piece of fruit to the always-hungry Jeff Bezos — friction.

Amazon devoured the retail sector, largely because it was able to remove friction from the buying process. In contrast, lumbering legacy retailers had loads of it. Their organizational silos got in the way of delivering an experience that was unified across channels and touch points. Their reluctance to move away from “one-size-fits-all” marketing strategies failed to make the shopping experience personalized. Their focus on the bottom line, rather than customer delight, stood in the way of a better, more local shopping experience.

As backward as all that sounds, those same retail “dinosaurs” were further up the evolutionary ladder than most of today’s healthcare providers. “Patient centricity,” while a buzz-worthy topic at many a healthcare industry conference, still hasn’t made its way into much of the real world, and certainly not at scale. Formidable obstacles in customer experience (convenience, pricing visibility, a “valued customer” attitude, etc.), environment (in neighborhood, in home, user experience, etc.), coordination (care navigators, connected specialists, etc.), and technology (apps, remote monitoring, telehealth, etc.) are just some of vulnerabilities that have many disruptors — and not just Amazon — licking their lips.

The healthcare industry does have one thing the retail industry did not — the hindsight of history.

Amazon’s methods are now as transparent as its motivations. Even so, as late as last July, Walgreens CEO Stefano Pessina expressed doubts that the chain would have to contend with Amazon’s entry into the prescription market. Likely grocery chain CEOs felt the same way before Amazon blindsided them with its move into brick and mortar.

Yet, for all the ominous analogs, healthcare is a different animal, and Amazon’s dominance of it is a tall order to be sure. However, if providers do not make removing friction from the healthcare experience a prime directive, they will have no one to blame but themselves. How can they go about doing this? That will be the topic of part two of this post.

To grow patient volume, start looking outward

In today’s healthcare market, growing patient volume is critical to success.  In recent years, health systems have focused on what might be described as supply-side growth strategies. However, a number of variables, such as aggressive physician recruitment and aggressive M&A consolidations, are taking the wind out of the sails of this inward-facing, supply-side approach. It might be time for your organization to create a fresh patient growth strategy, one that looks outward at potential patient demand and has a strong brand at the center.

Generating Demand

Patient volume growth comes down to demand generation — marketing that drives awareness and creates demand for your services. To have successful demand generation, you need seamless interplay among three drivers of growth: branding, lead generation, and customer engagement.

Branding

Brand recognition is one of the first interactions a potential customer will have with an organization, which is why it is key to implement strategies that allow employees to understand and truly live the brand. Throughout the entire decision-making journey, the brand is the overarching presence. A strong brand can be a huge driver of growth, leading to greater:

• Advocacy/referrals
• Awareness
• Engagement
• Intent to trial/use
• Market share
• Satisfaction
• Trust

Lead Generation

Running a successful lead generation campaign is dependent on a few factors. First, you must have content compelling enough to prompt an individual to exchange their contact information. This is done through a content strategy that offers prospective patients something informative and, in some cases, interactive — from videos and webinars to testimonials, eZines, and more. Second, you’ll need to have a marketing automation system in place if you don’t already. This simplifies the distribution of your lead generation materials, helping to turn prospects into customers.

Customer Engagement

It is far more likely to sell to an existing customer in the healthcare market than it is to sell to a new prospect (60-70% vs. 5-20%). That means you must engage customers—past and current patients— and deliver an outstanding experience.  Satisfied patients are more likely to return for services and be receptive to cross-selling than patients who had a poor experience, whether that’s a delay, inconvenient processes, a poor office atmosphere or interactions that don’t measure up to your brand’s promises.

What’s more, patients who have had good experiences are more likely to share their opinion with their family and friends and serve as your advocate. Word of mouth is among the best marketing techniques, especially in social media where individuals look to those they trust for recommendations on nearly everything.

Supply-side growth can work in certain cases, but overall, demand-side growth will yield the greatest returns — especially when enacted with a strong, integrated effort. And by integrating branding, lead generation, and customer engagement into your growth strategy, you can help transform your prospects into loyal patients. Need help getting started? Movéo’s vast expertise in the healthcare market can help boost your patient volumes. Contact us to get started.

Search is now three dimensional. Is your brand ready?

For years, our only option for making an online search was through our fingertips. While most searches still occur that way (despite the frustration this can cause on smaller mobile screens), search is finally changing thanks to two added dimensions:

Voice search

Over 20% of searches conducted on Google are now done by voice. This number is destined to increase exponentially as the virtual assistant market — think not only Google, but Alexa, Siri, etc. — heats up. This technology is collectively re-training people to search using their voices over their fingers (whether we are at home or not).

Visual search

This year, Google announced Google Lens, a technology that allows users to take a photo of something on their phone and filter it through visual recognition software that identifies and shares information on it. Google joins Pinterest, Amazon, eBay, and a growing number of retail brands that offer some flavor of visual search.

According to Pinterest, the company’s user base of 200 million people conduct an average of three visual searches a day.

Movéo insight:

Just as most companies now work to optimize their content for typed search queries, they will increasingly need to think about the other two dimensions of search as well.

Visual search, while growing, can be a challenge because certain types of brands will always lend themselves better to visual search than others — think a retailer with a big catalog of items vs. a health system. Still, how about a visual search function that can identify skin conditions and offer you up nearby dermatologists?

On the voice search front, many brands are now developing “skills” for Echo — Amazon’s term for voice-enabled apps that perform different tasks for its virtual home assistant. In fact, Amazon’s Alexa now has over 15,000 such skills, with more coming every day. Can your brand add a skill?

Abm strategies: One size does not fit all

Despite the uptick in recent buzz, account-based marketing (ABM) is by no means a new strategy. However, the growth of digital marketing tools and tactics has led to more variety in how to market.

When one thinks of ABM, the initial thought may be along the lines of simply scouting out new, major accounts and laser focusing marketing efforts on acquiring that business — spear fishing rather than casting a wide net. While this can be a good strategy to use at a specific point in time, one size does not fit all when it comes to ABM.

On the surface, your audience may seem as though it’s divided simply into customers and non-customers. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that your audience is much larger — especially among your existing customer base. In fact, more success can come from marketing to this group, as existing customers are 50 percent more likely to try new products from your clients and are likely to spend 31 percent more than new customers.

Among your customer base, there are four groups, as follows:

Fledgling Customers

Recently won customers, or those who have been won in less than a year’s time

Mature Customers

Top-tier, longer tenured customers with whom you’ve had business relations with

Iceberg Customers

Customers with much larger business potential than is currently being realized

Dormant Customers

Accounts that have reduced their spend or have not bought for an extended period of time

Each of these groups can benefit from ABM, but the strategies vary among all of them — using the same strategy across all leaves room for unmet growth potential, as the messages or services you’re marketing to each are specific to their current state as customers.

Your research should guide you to understand what each of these groups need. For example, a mature customer would not need an awareness email campaign the same way a fledgling customer would.

Among your non-customer base, your audience is divided into look-alikes — high-value accounts that share similar characteristics with existing top-tier customers — and anonymous customers. This is the stage in which your “spear fishing” tactics come into play.

If, through your research, you find look-alikes, your data can help you find opportunities within these new accounts and select the right channels to reach them — Invespcro found that paid search and online display advertising ranks among the highest channels for acquisition, whereas it is used far less for retention purposes.

ABM can seem complicated, but keeping in mind there is more to it than acquisition can help yield far better business outcomes than solely focusing one landing that new “big fish.”

Native advertising: Tips for top performance

You’ve seen it before: the sponsored content on Facebook and Instagram; the editorial on your favorite news site that plugs a certain product or company — often marked with a “sponsor content” tag up top; even all those nice BMWs in your favorite movie (strange how everyone seems to be driving one, right?).

These are all examples of native advertising, a type of promotional messaging created to look as though it’s a part of the third-party platform or website on which it is hosted. In some cases, the ads “blend in” so well that it’s difficult to recognize the advertisement aspect at all — to the extent that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires advertisers to disclose that the content is, in fact, an ad to avoid misleading consumers.

For marketers, native advertising presents opportunities that traditional display ads simply do not. By developing content that audience can better engage with rather than simply scroll past (or miss completely due to online ad blockers), marketers are seeing better performance and results, with native ads being viewed 25 percent more than display ads, intent to purchase growing 53 percent higher, and brand lift growing by 82 percent.

If this sounds like enough reason to either begin or ramp up your native advertising endeavors, keep the following best practices in mind:

• Make it clear that your ad is in fact an ad — don’t deceive your audience
• Ensure your message resonates with customers beyond simply naming your product or service
• Add a logo to help with recall
• Ensure that your ad matches the look and feel of the site’s content
• Ensure the landing page you’re driving customers to is relevant to the ad that drove them there in the first place
• Evaluate your data and optimize as necessary

Movéo has a deep understanding of the growth potential through native advertising. And as a data-driven agency, we know the importance of utilizing data to foster even more growth. Not sure where to get started? Our experts would love to help — contact us today.

How an “Excel sheet on steroids” could change marketing forever

If you haven’t heard of blockchain, you will. This bleeding- edge ledger is already being used to track transactions in cryptographically verified sequences (i.e., “blocks”) globally. The result is a rock solid data integrity and a definitive record of who owns what and when.

The much-hyped cryptocurrency Bitcoin runs on blockchain, but the technology has potential application well beyond finance. Here are just some of its uses that Digiday speculates may impact the field of marketing:

• Reward and pay creators for making content
• Make ad buys by pooling data securely
• Ensure ads are seen and a verifiable record made showing by whom
• Use smart contracts — like the kind made possible by blockchain technology company Ethereum — for digital marketing campaigns

Blockchain is in its infancy, but just as programmatic advertising showed, what starts out a puzzling phenomenon can become an industry standard in a very short time.

Movéo insight:

Blockchain is no fad. The question is not if it will grow, but rather how big it will get. The reason? Blockchain aligns perfectly with a world where “trust” can now only be ensured by transactions that take place over distributed networks that no single person, group, corporation, or government can own. Want to learn more? Here’s blockchain explained in a 60 second video.

Why Google Premier Partners get more value from AdWords

For marketers, Google is more than just a search engine. It’s a critical part of successful digital marketing. Research from Forrester indicates that 71% of buyers begin their purchase journeys with an online search. Clearly, marketers have a vested interest in featuring their solutions in search, where buyers are looking — and Google AdWords can help them do it.

However, launching successful AdWords campaigns isn’t always easy. The rules are complex and always changing. To ensure your campaigns convert leads and deliver ROI, it’s important to choose the right partner. Specifically, a Google Premier Partner.

What Makes a Premier Partner?

Google Partners is a tiered program that certifies agencies as AdWords experts based on a defined set of criteria. “Premier” is the program’s top tier, for agencies with the highest level of AdWords expertise. To become a Premier Partner, agencies must meet Google’s high standards in three areas.

First, knowledge. Premier Partner agencies must employ individuals who pass Google’s rigorous certification tests. These come in several specializations: search, display, mobile, shopping and video. And because AdWords changes so frequently, Google requires Premier Partners to renew their certifications every 12 months — proving that they’re both skilled and up-to-date.

Second, experience. After all, theoretical AdWords knowledge is only useful if it translates into on-the-ground campaigns. That’s why Google requires its Premier Partners to meet an annual ad spend benchmark. This shows agencies are putting their money where their mouth is and getting results for their clients.

Third, success. Because the most important AdWords campaigns are those that generate ROI, Premier Partners must consistently launch campaigns that meet rigorous conversion requirements. With a track record of high-performing campaigns, Premier Partners demonstrate that when it comes to getting ROI from AdWords, they’re the best of the best.

Get More Value from AdWords

At Movéo, we’re proud to be a certified Google Premier Partner. Our in-house AdWords experts are certified in search, mobile and display ads. It’s an exciting affirmation that we (and our clients) make the most of everything AdWords has to offer. As a Premier Partner, we also have exclusive access to new AdWords programs and beta tests — and quick access to Google experts for troubleshooting.

AdWords can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. To take advantage of this powerful tool and get the conversions and ROI you want, it all comes down to choosing the right partner.