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Technology giants Google and Microsoft have entered into the online healthcare biz with the launches of Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health. Both platforms allow anyone to create a free account, which they can update with personal medical information and family health history. Secured settings allow the user to keep their personal information public or private, depending on their preferences.
Aside from importing medical records, HealthVault and Google Health let users search for doctors and other health services that might be of interest. Digital devices, such as blood pressure monitors, that monitor your health and upload it to your physician are also in the works. This cuts time and money from routine office visits, hopefully making healthcare more efficient and affordable.
Microsoft’s HealthVault, which is currently in beta, has much more of a professional feel. Google is using their traditional simple layout with bubbly icons and lots of white space. Trustworthiness and credibility go a long way in the health care industry, even in design, and right now it looks like Google isn’t quite as far along in the development stage.
To learn more about our healthcare marketing services, visit Moveo.com.
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Search engine marketing for a business-to-business company is different than for a business-to-consumer company. In short, there’s more research involved with the user before a buying decision is made. In most instances, B2B purchases are very substantial in cost and can even involve a contract for a decided amount of time. In addition to this, the researcher may not even be the person who has authority to make the buying decision. The user may be researching a number of companies to present to whomever makes the decision. It may take weeks, months or longer for a purchase to be made, if at all.
So how can we market a B2B company site in the search engines to take advantage of this behavior? We still want to bring users to the B2B site through SEO and PPC efforts. The key is to have information that the user can download or have sent to them via e-mail, thus making a conversion. Newsletter and white papers are an excellent way to keep communications alive with the potential client. Make sure these pieces of information are easy to find no matter what page the user is on and don’t make any forms too tedious to fill out.
When analyzing your traffic keep in mind the behavior and processes that the user is more than likely following. This will help you translate your analytics into useful data. Don’t look for the quick sale. It’s all about conversions and continuing that relationship you’ve started.
Jeff Swanson
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Ever wonder who the top 100 brands in the world are? We’ve all heard about how Coca-Cola is the top brand world wide, but which brands are in their company and how do they rank online?
Here’s a list of the top 100 global brands in 2008, according to Interbrand; and the top 100 global brands online of 2007, according to FutureLab.
Interbrand’s best global brands of 2008
Futurelab’s top 100 online global brands of 2007 (click on the Futurelab 100 link)
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Two metrics that help define your brand effectiveness online are direct traffic and brand-related searches. Direct traffic refers to users that typed your domain name into their URL bar, taking them directly to your site. This can be a telling statistic because it means that the user is aware of you. There was no search involved in this process. The user was cognizant of your brand and went directly to your site. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us how the user became aware of your site and how they feel about your site. Most analytic programs will, however, tell us if the user has previously visited the site (within 30 days), but there’s only so much you can assume from that data.
Another piece of traffic data that provides insight to your Internet brand presence is the traffic you receive from brand-related searches. This data includes any traffic that was driven to your site that includes your name in the search. For example, imagine a user that performs the search “3m tape” in Yahoo, we can conclude that the user is looking specifically for that brand and is aware of this brand. Of course, you can only measure the traffic that goes to your site, so it’s important to make sure you are visible in the search engines. If not, you can use a keyword suggestion tool to get an estimate of how many searches include your brand name in a given time period.
There’s only so much we can take from these numbers, but they do say something about your brand. Analytic programs are not completely accurate, which is why it’s important to use this data as only a guideline to your sites’ traffic performance. By keeping a mindful eye on your direct traffic, brand-related searches and repeat visitors you should be able to some away with something meaningful about your presence online.
You can take additional measures by taking note of what others are saying about your brand. The best way to do this is with Google Alerts. With this tool, you can have an e-mail alert sent to your inbox every time your brand is mentioned on a site that is indexed by Google. If you’re not already doing this, I suggest you check it out.
Jeff Swanson
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Not happy with the results of your house list email marketing campaigns? The problem might not be with your content but instead with your list. Many of you probably spend time analyzing email metrics like opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribes etc. but what about inactivity? What about those subscribers who do nothing? The disengaged, bored and tired.
List fatigue happens when subscribers no longer respond to your messages. Its not that they don't click on your messages, they don't open them, not even to unsubscribe, they just ignore them. These do-nothing subscribers are bringing your campaigns down and you're watering down your metrics and jeopardizing your reputation by ignoring them–not to mention missing opportunities to reengage them.
If you send mail to inactive subscribers you put your emailing reputation ability to deliver emails at risk. ISPs often turn old email addresses no longer in use into to traps called "honeypots" to see which email marketers continue to send to invalid email addresses as a means to identify spammers. Additionally, ISPs also monitor the number of bounces email marketers generate and once you reach a certain threshold your emails won't be delivered.
In addition to protecting your reputation, removing inactive subscribers helps improve the accuracy of the results of your email marketing campaigns, lowers the cost of each deployment and ultimately increases ROI. If you send a message to 10,000 subscribers but only 8,000 are active, you're not only paying to send messages to 2,000 people that won't read them, you're skewing your metrics because every email metric is measured against the number of messages delivered. If 10,000 messages are sent and only 4500 open them your open rate is 45%. However, if you send 8000 messages and 4500 are opened your open rate is 56% and its more accurate because you are measuring response from your engaged subscribers and not watering it down by measuring response from subscribers who will never respond.
So what do you do? Define a strategy for identifying inactive subscribers and develop a campaign to get those subscribers reengaged. Monitor and ferret out those who do not respond and remove them from your list.
Remember its not the size of the list that counts. Its how well you work it.
Dave Cannon, Director, Interactive Services
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Major search engines allow "negative matching," giving advertisers the ability to
serve keywords only to the eyeballs you want seeing them. This ability
allows for the best qualified traffic possible. The search campaign's ads
will not be shown for searches that are not relevant, therefore there will
be fewer click-throughs that do not convert to sales. Secondly, the overall
click-through rate (CTR) will be higher because there will be fewer
instances of searchers viewing the ad but not clicking. The higher CTR will
cause the ad to attain a higher position without requiring a higher cost per
click (CPC).
Conclusion? By simply employing negative keywords into your search marketing
campaign you have the ability to improve your position ranking and target
your audience more efficiently.
Dan Murray
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As the Internet evolves it takes many industries along for the ride. One such industry is healthcare. Way back in the old days, more popularly known as the ‘90’s, healthcare customers would rely on word-of-mouth references and telephone books to find a family doctor. But oh how the times have changed.
Nowadays, the Internet has molded us into a research-intense society. We can go online and scour the Web to help find qualified doctors. Thanks to user-generated content, some sites even allow us to categorize potential physicians not only by proximity, but by ratings and reviews.
Because of this migration to the Web, it’s critical that healthcare companies and physicians are visible online. The Internet is the new phone book, but more dynamic. Healthcare doctors and companies can host a blog, publish videos, educate their clients, etc. There’s a whole new world of Internet healthcare marketing. Sites like WebMD.com have physician directories complete with profiles and contact information. It’s important for physicians to be included in these major directories, so they don’t miss out on potential customers.
Jeff Swanson, Organic Search Specialist
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These days it’s hard not to read the news, turn on the TV or go for a walk without someone talking about the economy and bailouts for the financial and automotive industry. Usually this news is followed up by a story that some company, who is begging for money is also throwing lavish training seminars at spas across the country or taking private jets to Washington.
What I find interesting is that these corporations, these marketing icons, are making such public relations fauxpas. How would congress have reacted if the big three would have driven to D.C. in a new hybrids and said “We need to change they way we have been doing things and we’ll start by investing in fuel efficient cars,” or is AIG would have held meetings at their home office to train employees. These events have no doubt hurt their images on a national scale.
We at Movéo say that you are your company’s brand. A brand is comprised of thousands of "moments of truth". These "moments" are interactions that take place every day within a company, and outside of the orghanization with customers, clients, patients, etc. The examples that AIG and the big three have set over the last few weeks certainly did not provide a positive image of their brands. For the sake of Wall Street and Detroit let’s hope they can figure out who they are as a brand and where they want to go into the future.
Lewis Bailey, Engagement Manager
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Barack Obama is the first African-American president-elect of the United States, but that is not the only way he made history…
Obama also made political history by being the first to place presidential campaign ads in online video games. Obama featured Internet ads in 18 games through Microsoft Corp's Xbox Live service to promote his online voter registration and early balloting drive in 10 states – Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. All of which are swing states won over by President Bush in 2004, interestingly enough.
Appearing in the games as banners or billboards, the ads featured an image of Obama, the slogan "Early voting has begun" and a reference to his VoteForChange.com website. On this site users were able to register online to vote, obtain absentee voter information and/or find a polling location. Obama also ran a 30-minute ad on CBS, NBC and Fox on October 29.
Obviously Obama being elected president is the ultimate indicator of success, but I would like to know some hard statistics and the real correlation between these ads and Obama's victory. How were they tracked? How many of the people exposed to both the video game ads and TV ads voted for Obama? Did voting rates for males 18-25 (the target audience for the ads) increase? By how much? What was their attitude toward the ads? Will this become the norm for future presidential elections?
Amy Mengel, Engagement Coordinator
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It’s funny to me how it seems that the first thing companies tend to do in economic hard times is “trim” (PC word for cut) their marketing budgets. I can understand that need to cut back spending during downturns but to cut back marketing dollars seems counter intuitive to me. When budgets tighten, sales become even more elusive to capture so you would think that your marketing efforts would strengthen not weaken.
Instead of cutting the dollars that help generate revenue, cut the superfluous spending. Nix the corporate trips and golf outings. Wave good-bye to the retreats and luncheons and start looking at marketing budgets as an investment not a liability. In a recent poll taken by B-to-B magazine, 66% of advertising executives said their clients were either cutting or reallocating their budgets elsewhere while 27% were actually increasing their budgets during these hard times. No that’s not a typo, 27% are actually increasing their budgets. Why? Because your competition could be on their heels. As Bob Liodice, president of the Association of National Advertisers, says “In an economic downturn, this is the time for marketers to capture a greater share of market by investing robustly in a well-defined marketing mix. Your competition may be letting their guard down”.
In fact, 40% of the previously polled ad execs admitted that budgets would increase in 2009 showing confidence that economic downturn would be short-lived. This means that in the big picture, the 27% of firms that increase their budgets now, will be in the drivers seat in 09 while the competition plays catch-up. When it comes time to evaluate your current marketing budget keep this in mind; Do you want to be a leader or a follower?
