Time for Some Healthcare New Year's Resolutions

It’s that time of year for many people to head off for a festive break before seeing out the year. It’s a time for reflection – on what has been good and bad about 2015 – and the chance to make pledges social media marketing firms to do things better in 2016. Healthcare has seen some real evolution this year. The value of patient engagement has started to be truly recognized by all the other stakeholders to elevate patient centricity above being another buzzword. In addition, the potential for big data to revolutionize management of wellness and disease is also becoming a reality as technology advances and allies with a growing focus on personalized healthcare, shifting everyone’s focus. Patients: become more active in your own health At the vanguard of patient empowerment we are seeing individuals who are tracking their own health using all the tools now available to them. But more than that, they have the confidence to know their voice has at least equal weight versus others in staying healthy and treating any disease. They are no longer passive recipients of medical advice; they are proactive champions of the quantified self and challengers of traditional health system hierarchies. In 2016, more patients should move down this path and engage on even terms with the other stakeholders. It will benefit everyone. - Healthcare providers: accept your role has changed In light of patient social media in marketing empowerment, healthcare providers – doctors, nurses and all others on the front line of medical intervention – should accept that the dynamic of their role has changed. Yes, time is extremely limited; yes, the hours are long; yes, resources are limited; and yes, there is a great deal of misinformation to contend with. But fighting it will not change the direction of travel. Instead, use your medical expertise and training to help guide patients though their journey and, in doing so, keep learning yourself. Your role is critical so don’t stand still in such as fast-changing environment. -

I promise to have more personality.

Here’s another thing that brands forget when they’re socializing online. People are accessing social media marketing books for the most part to have fun (B2B sites like LinkedIn aside). They’re there to catch up with friends, share things that are happening in their lives, and to be entertained. So you can’t be strictly business – you can’t just talk about your products and services. You have to present the human side of your company, and social media is the right place to present your human side. Let your fans and followers get to know your brand and the people behind your brand.I promise not to be so uptight. Here I am more talking about compliance. You guys have got to lighten up. The reality is there’s tons of stuff already being said about you and your brand in social media and nothing you do is going to stop that. Now I’m not saying give people license to be stupid and say things they shouldn’t say, but compliance does not approve everything your people say in public, at speaking engagements, or in live interviews. Sanction a group of people to speak on behalf of the company in social media and trust what they say just like you do with media and public relations. I know this is more realistic for some companies than others, but there are a ton of things your social media people should be at will to tweet, post, and say without having to run it through approval. Figure out as many of those scenarios as possible and let the content flow.I promise to be patient. If you’re just dipping your toe into the social media pond you will never get wet. It takes time to build up your social media presence and to leave your content in the fabric of the web. For many of us the real benefits of small business social media marketing will be realized via search. So give it some time and realize there is no better way to spread your thought leadership content, offers, and product accolades through the web and social media.

Know your market

Rather than sending social media marketing plan sample out mass advertisements and hoping to reach potential customers, Baird is strategic about spending his advertising budget, using Facebook’s targeting features so that only the right people see his ads. “I use the tools to choose audience, interest, geography, sex and age,” he says. Few people ever Google “lavender farm in Milton,” so in the early days, getting Facebook ads in front of the appropriate audience was crucial for Terre Bleu. Baird’s strategy, for example, focused on women who lived near his farm and who were interested in topics such as food and photography, a niche he anticipated would be likely to visit—and spend—when the time came to open. He also made the conscious decision to aim for quality Facebook fans instead of quantity. “Not all likes are created equal,” he says. “It isn’t important to me to get 50,000 likes. It’s more important to get 5,000 people who are really interested in the products we make. Then I can focus my marketing and messaging around that.” Take a soft-sell approach“Don’t use Facebook as a selling medium,” Baird says. “I don’t mean you shouldn’t set up a Facebook store, but if every post is about selling a product or pitching a deal, I don’t think the medium works well. People get turned off.” It might sound corny, but Baird really does think of his Facebook audience as a community based on a shared interest. He always keeps that in mind when interacting on the social platform, rather than using it as a tool to move inventory. “We were trying to create a sense of place in our branding,” Baird says. “People like marketing on social media knowing where products are made. Just by showing photographs of the bees or how we harvest or that we had a devastating winter and it destroyed half our plants, that created an attachment to our farm, which allowed us to capture the price points we needed to create a premium experience.”