Social Media offers a powerful opportunity for Digital Health marketers to connect with health IT influencers, key decision makers, and end users. Social Media offers the opportunity to amplify your marketing message. Social Media is your tool to create relationships with prospects and customers.
But without a plan that connects to your Vision, Brand, and Market Positioning, Social Media can be an expensive waste of time… and actually hurt your marketing efforts.
In this first episode of four on Social Media for Digital Health Marketers, we’ll explore how to create a rock solid Social Media plan to fuel your Social Media Marketing activities.
About This Show:
Each Wednesday, Sam Stern, founder and Chief Marketing Technologist at Modallic, an mHealth marketing and brand development firm reveals his winning Mobile, Digital and healthcare IT marketing strategies, shares real life Mobile Health marketing success stories, and offers breakthrough marketing tips and tactics so you can lead the field with your Mobile Health and healthcare IT solutions.
Discover how to craft compelling stories to open doors with key health care system decision makers. Understand how an agile marketing mindset and approach positions you to create a profitable, sustainable business.
Gain insights into Mobile Health and healthcare IT marketing strategy, how to tell your unique mHealth and healthcare IT marketing story, creating your mHealth buyer personas, how to integrate an agile marketing process, mobile health and digital health brand development and market positioning, and learn what really works in attracting and landing mobile health and healthcare IT clients.
Show Notes:
Why Social Media for Digital Health Marketing?
Social Media is now more than a tactic or platform. It’s here to stay. It’s where your prospects, clients, and industry influencers spend time and connect online. Social media is your opportunity to break through all the noise, earn attention, and add value to your prospects.
To achieve digital health marketing success, you must learn to leverage Social Media. Social Media is your avenue to meet your prospects and clients online.
It positions you to:
Listen to the market- Learn what problems your prospects face, the language they use to describe these problems, and the solutions they seek.
Build relationships- With industry influencers who can help spread your marketing message and add credibility… With the right prospects for your digital health products and services… Deepen relationships with clients, turning them into advocates who help spread your message and awareness of the value you deliver.
Promote Your Content- Using Social Media, you have the ability to promote and amplify your marketing message with value-added content.
Today, the marketing process and how buyers engage with sales is vastly different. In the past, a B2B prospect engaged with a salesperson to get information about a company’s products and services. Marketing was focused on brand building using mass advertising, trade shows, Public Relations, and print media. Sales people opened up opportunities with direct mail and cold phone calling to a targeted audience. Marketing passed all leads, both hot and cold, to sales for aggressive follow up.
Now, thanks to online research and the ability to tap social networks easily online, buyers are in control of the sales process. Most of the research is done prior to meeting with the sales person, so the sales person is no longer the source of product and service information. Today brand building is accomplished through social media engagement. Today marketers must learn how to tell their story in formats and on the social media platforms where their prospects spend time.
Harness Social Media: Create a Social Media Marketing Gameplan
Effective Social Media Marketing begins with a solid foundation. Your strategy is the building block of this foundation.
In an earlier series of podcasts, I talked about a four-step approach to digital health marketing. These same four steps apply in creating a Social Media Marketing strategy.
1. Social Media Marketing Assessment- The steps of your Social Media Marketing Assessment include:
Identify Your Objectives- What is your firm’s vision? What are your overall company goals and objectives- short-term and long-term?
Assess Your Social Media Resources- Do you have the right staff of access to outsource talent to carry out your social media plan? What tools and software do you need to distribute, monitor, and measure social media activity?
What’s Your Distribution Plan? Where will you focus your social media engagement and activity? What will you share- articles, white papers, photos, videos, etc.?
Assess Existing Social Media Assets and Leadership Support- Where do you have a social media following now? Are your social media profiles optimized? Is the firm’s leadership on board with the use of social media? Will the leaders actively participate?
2. Understand Your Buyer Personas- Who are your buyers? Create detailed written descriptions of your buyer personas. Regarding social media, what social media platforms do your buyers use? Are they active on Twitter or LinkedIn? Do they use Facebook? Do they share and post photos online? How do they access social media… on a desktop at work, a laptop while traveling, or a smartphone while at an event?
3. Identify Your Social Media Marketing Gaps- What’s missing from your social media marketing plan? Do you need to create a LinkedIn Company Page or Google+ Business Page? Do you need to attract more Followers to your Pages to display credibility and social proof of value?
4. Create a Social Media Marketing Action Plan that Builds Your Brand and Positioning-Podcast #008, Digital Health Marketing- Branding and Positioning Action Plan, reveals the steps needed and resources available to execute your Digital Marketing Branding and Positioning Plan. Your Social Media marketing plan follows the same steps, with the focus on the right social media networks, engagement, and content.
Follow these four steps to create your Social Media Marketing foundation.
The right Social Media Marketing strategy…
1. Connects with your Business Vision.
2. Connects with your Buyer Personas.
3. Builds relationships with Industry Influencers, Decision Makers, and End Users.
4. Tells your story in quick, bite-sized morsels- a photo with a quote from a post on Google+. A link with a photo on LinkedIn. Quotes from an article with a link on Twitter.
5. Amplifies your marketing message.
6. Pulls prospects into your marketing and sales funnel.
7. Is efficient and cost-effective to operate and monitor.
8. Is agile and flexible to adapt to changing market tastes and technology… and most importantly, what you learn about what your buyers really want.
Next Steps and Next Week:
Building Your Social Media Team: Who are the Key Players and what do they do?
Resources:
mHealthMarketer Podcast #005- Digital Health Marketing Assessment
mHealthMarker Podcast #006- Digital Health Marketing- How to Test and Nail Down Buyer Personas
mHealthMarketer Podcast #007- Digital Health Marketing- Identify Content and Communication Gaps
mHealthMarketer Podcast #008- Digital Health Marketing- Branding and Positioning Action Plan
Nearly Half of B2Bs Expect a Marketing Budget Bump in 2014
Will You Help Me Get This Message Out There?
Want to get more tips and strategies for marketing your digital health firm? There are three ways you can enjoy these tips and strategies, share them with friends, and help me grow this movement to end the lack of innovation in healthcare:
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Finally, if you have a question you’d like answered on a future show — or if you have any feedback in general — please let me know: sstern@modallic.com
Thanks again for your support!
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