Inbound Marketing 101 for SLPs and Audiologists
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The marketing landscape has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Health consumers are far more in control of the traditional "outbound" marketing messages they see than ever before. DVR, Caller ID, and Internet radio have all disrupted traditional marketing techniques. At the same time, there are growing opportunities to reach health consumers online. According to the Pew Research Center's Health Online 2013 Survey, "72% of internet users say they looked online for health information of one kind or another within the past year." Learn how you can position your practice or business to thrive in this new "inbound" marketing landscape.
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Inbound Marketing 101 for SLPs and Audiologists
- 1. Inbound Marketing 101 for SLPs and Audiologists Tom Jelen Director of Online Communications American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Twitter: @tomjelen Email: tjelen@asha.org
- 3. Financial Relationships: I work for ASHA. They pay my salary. They paid for me to be here. Nonfinancial Relationships: None
- 4. I am not a marketer by training.
- 5. I am not an SLP or Audiologist.
- 6. I have worked in the digital technology field since 1998.
- 7. I have been a health care consumer since about 1994.
- 8. I will get tired of hearing myself talk for an hour and thirty minutes.
- 9. Outdoor activities in Las Vegas?
- 10. How would I have found outdoor activities in Las Vegas before 1995?
- 11. Travel agent?
- 12. Lonely Planet?
- 13. Any other ways I could have used to find outdoor activities in Las Vegas before 1995?
- 14. How do I find outdoor activities in 2014?
- 15. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
- 16. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
- 17. How did we get here?
- 18. The rise of Google in 3 statistics
- 19. "Every day Google answers more than one billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages. 15% of the searches we see everyday we’ve never seen before." Source: Facts about Google and Competition. Retrieved February 21, 2014, from http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html
- 20. Source: Google’s downtime caused a 40% drop in global traffic. Retrieved February 21, 2014, from https://engineering.gosquared.com/googles-downtime-40-drop-in-traffic "Google.com was down for a few minutes… on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of page views coming into GoSquared’s real-time tracking – around a 40% drop.”
- 21. Source: Google Analytics. Retrieved February 21, 2014. In January 2014, Google referred 57% of the traffic to ASHA’s Websites.
- 22. Pause: How else does Google impact your business or practice?
- 23. What is happening to traditional advertising ROI?
- 24. Image credit: Tom Jelen
- 25. “Based on measurements taken from hundreds of websites over 11 months, we show that up to 30% of web visitors are blocking ads, and that the number of adblocking users is growing at an astonishing 43% per year.” Source: Beck, Cody. "The Rise of Adblocking: The PageFair 2013 Report" PageFair Blog. N.p., 21 Aug. 2013. Web. 21 Feb. 2014. <http://blog.pagefair.com/2013/the-rise-of-adblocking/>.
- 27. As of December 30, 2011, “…the Do Not Call Registry now has more than 209 million active registrations, and more than eight million new phone numbers were registered in Fiscal Year 2011.” Source: "FTC Sends Biennial Report to Congress on the National Do Not Call Registry" Dec. 2011. Web. 21 Feb. 2014. <http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/12/ftc-sends-biennial-report-congress-national-do-not-call-registry>.
- 29. “The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a landmark ruling that modern digital video recorders with the ability to automatically skip commercials are permitted under copyright's fair use doctrine.” Source: Lee, T. B. (2013, July 24). Court says skipping ads doesn’t violate copyright. That’s a big deal. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com
- 31. “Netflix is the world's leading Internet television network with over 44 million members in more than 40 countries enjoying more than 1 billion hours of TV shows and movies per month.” Source: Netflix Company Information. Retrieved February 21, 2014, from https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/loginPageSalesNetWorksAction.do?contentGroupId=10476&contentGroup=Company+Fa cts
- 32. So how do you get new business in 2014?
- 33. What is the difference between outbound and inbound marketing?
- 34. "Inbound marketing focuses on earning, not buying, a person's attention.“ - Lauren Drell Mashable Source: Drell, L. (2011, October 30). Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing. Mashable . Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2011/10/30/inbound-outbound-marketing/
- 37. Inbound marketing is not new. The Web has simply made it much easier and cheaper.
- 38. Pre-Web Post-Web Writing a book on a topic Writing a blog on a topic Speaking at a community event or local conference Delivering a webinar Writing an article in a parenting magazine about infant hearing screening Writing a guest post on a parenting blog about infant hearing screening
- 39. Pause: What questions do you have about the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
- 40. How do you get started?
- 42. 1. Make an Appointment 2. Learn More 3. Join Our Email List 4. Follow Us on Social Media 5. Sign Up Here - Cortney Phillips Screwpile Communications Source: Phillips, C. (2013, December 3). Healthcare Inbound Marketing: The Art of the Call-to-Action. Retrieved from http://www.screwpilecommunications.com/screwpile-marketing-blog/ Top 5 Calls-to-Action Your Healthcare Organization Should Be Using
- 43. Pause: What other calls-to-action might you have for your practice or business?
- 44. Choose Audience Define the Need Create Content Distribute and Promote Content
- 45. The entire world should not be your audience.
- 46. Choose Audience Define the Need Create Content Distribute and Promote Content
- 47. What questions do people ask you all the time?
- 48. Choose Audience Define the Need Create Content Distribute and Promote Content
- 49. Remember you are an expert. Most people don’t know what you do.
- 50. SEO in 4 Easy Steps
- 51. Step 1: Create high quality content “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other Websites or sites that are just not very useful.” - Amit Singhal, Google Fellow Matt Cutts, Google Principal Engineer February 24, 2011 Source: Singhal, A. & Cutts, M. (2011, February 24). Finding more high-quality sites in search. Retrieved from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
- 52. “We aren't disclosing the actual ranking signals used in our algorithms because we don't want folks to game our search results.” - Amit Singhal, Google Fellow Matt Cutts, Google Principal Engineer May 6, 2011 Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
- 53. 1.“Would you trust the information presented in this article? 2.Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature? 3.Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors? 4.Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? 5.Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?” Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html Amit Singhal, Google Fellow:
- 54. 6. “For a health related query, would you trust information from this site? 7. Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? 8. Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? 9. Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? 10. Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?” Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html Amit Singhal, Google Fellow:
- 55. Step 2: Write good headings
- 56. Step 3: Write a meaningful meta title and description
- 57. Step 4: Create a meaningful URL http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/dysarthria/
- 58. Choose Audience Define the Need Create Content Distribute and Promote Content
- 59. Stay focused.
- 60. Twitter
- 61. “Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting.” Source: https://twitter.com/about
- 62. Source: Jack Dorsey’s Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/95728450@N00/182613360/
- 64. In the final quarter of 2013, Twitter announced that 241 million users were active on the site in the last month. Source: https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=823321
- 65. In August 2013, Twitter’s blog reported that Twitter usually processes half a billion tweets a day. Source: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how/
- 67. A Tale of Two Baby Photos
- 68. Clara Margaret Jelen July 17, 2005 Image credit: Tom Jelen
- 69. Image credit: Tom Jelen
- 70. Valerie Katherine Jelen May 28, 2009 Image credit: Tom Jelen
- 71. Image credit: Tom Jelen
- 72. "On average more than 350 million photos per day were uploaded to Facebook in the fourth quarter of 2012. Over 240 billion photos have been shared on Facebook." Source: Facebook Annual Report 2012. Retrieved February 21, 2014, from https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/30303M/20130409/AR_166822/
- 73. Facebook had 757 million daily active users on average in December 2013. Source: Facebook Newsroom: Key Facts. Retrieved February 21, 2014, from http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts
- 74. In January 2014, Facebook referred 30x more traffic to ASHA.org than NIH.gov. Source: Google Analytics. Retrieved February 21, 2014.
- 77. “Google+ Pages provides businesses, products, brands, and organizations with a public identity and presence on Google+.” Source: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1710600?hl=en
- 80. “Create a LinkedIn Company Page to raise brand awareness, promote career opportunities, and educate potential customers on your products and services.” Source: http://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/company-pages.html
- 83. Let’s see it in action.
- 84. Choose Audience: Parents of Toddlers that may need feeding therapy Define the Need: When should you pursue feeding therapy for your toddler? Create Content: Guest post on Friendship Circle Special Needs blog Distribute and Promote Content: Facebook Page, Pinterest, Twitter, SEO
- 88. Choose Audience: Parents of Older Internationally Adopted Children Define the Need: What are speech and language delays in internationally adopted older children? Create Content: Blog post, Adoption Magazine article Distribute and Promote Content: Facebook Page, Pinterest, SEO
- 92. Now you try.
- 93. Choose Audience: Define the Need: Create Content: Distribute and Promote Content:
- 94. “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” - Winston Churchill
- 95. How do you measure results?
- 97. Conversion Conversion Funnel: Step 1 - ? Landing Page
- 98. Conversion: Email subscription form complete. Conversion Funnel: Step 1: Fill out email subscription form. Landing Page: Blog Post
- 99. Conversion: Order complete. Conversion Funnel: Step 1: Shipping & Billing Step 2: Payment Landing Page: Product Page
- 105. Inbound Summary 1. People are searching for answers online. 2. Traditional advertising may not be generating the same ROI that it once was. 3. "Inbound marketing focuses on earning, not buying, a person's attention.“ - Lauren Drell, Mashable 4. Start by defining (measureable) success. 5. Follow four basic steps when creating your content: 1-Choose an Audience, 2-Define the Need, 3-Create the Content, and then 4- Distribute and Promote It. 6. Take the time to measure so you can see what is working.
- 106. “People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago so markets need to adapt or risk extinction.” - HubSpot CEO, Brian Halligan
- 108. Credits Unless otherwise specified, all images in this presentation are screenshots from the public web or they are licensed images from ThinkStock.com.
Editor's Notes
- Good morning. This is another early session for Las Vegas. Welcome to “Inbound Marketing 101 for SLPs and Audiologists.” My name is Tom Jelen and I am the Director of Online Communications for ASHA. You can access these slides on Slideshare using the short URL:
- Before I get too far, I’d like to provide the required disclosure.
- As I mentioned, I work for ASHA. Not surprisingly, I am paid for that work. They also paid for me to fly out here and speak to all of you. I do not have any nonfinancial relationships to report. I’ve always liked the transparency that these disclosures provide. If you attended my mobile session yesterday you will know that I have made it a habit of providing some additional disclosures and disclaimers for all of my ASHA presentations…
- I am not a marketer by background. My degree is in computer science and I imagine there are plenty of other people in this room that are better versed in the core concepts of marketing. I am interested in inbound marketing and I proposed this session because I have recognized it is such a big shift in how you reach customers and I think its highly relevant to small business and private practioners. I have plenty of experience as the consumer of inbound marketing.
- As you probably know by now… I am not an SLP or Audiologist. You know your customers far better than I do. My hope is that you will be able to adapt the concepts from this presentation and make them your own.
- I do have some experience developing websites and digital products. I started working professionally on the web in 1998 (back when Netscape was still popular). I lived in San Francisco through the first dot-com bubble and bust. I witnessed first-hand the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0 and I have helped shepherd ASHA’s digital strategy for the past 8 years. It’s been a fun ride.
- I’ve been to plenty of health care websites over the years. I’ve seen some websites taking advantage of the new digital tools and techniques available to them and I’ve also seen some providers that basically seem to ignore their online presence. Unfortunately, my family seems to visit all the providers in the latter category.
- To make this a valuable session, I need your questions and your input. I don’t pretend to have all the answers in my presentation and I am sure there is plenty of wisdom in this room to share. I have built in a few points along the way for pausing and answering questions, but if anything I am saying is flat out confusing, please feel free to stop me so I can answer along the way. And since we are in Vegas, I have 5 pairs of dice for the first five people that ask a question. On the case, it says that (I am quoting): “These Dice Were Used in Actual Play at This Fabulous Casino.” It doesn’t get any better than that, right?
- Ok, enough about me. Let’s get started… This is my third or fourth time visiting Las Vegas. I am not a big gambler. I only feel comfortable playing roulette and my understanding of the odds is that if you're betting $100 an hour on roulette, you will, in the long run, lose an average of $5.26 an hour. Anyway, as I was planning my trip out here, I found myself wondering if I could do something outside during my trip. I love hiking and biking and I was pretty sure that there are some parks outside of the city.
- The problem is that I live ANIMATE outside of Washington DC. ANIMATE And Vegas is a couple thousand miles away. ANIMATE Let’s imagine that it is 1995 again. How would I have discovered outdoor activities in a city 2,000 miles away in 1995?
- Maybe I would have called a travel agent and asked her if she had some tips. Most travel agents know all the major travel destinations really well and I probably would have gotten some great tips. But, I imagine I would need to pay for that assistance.
- When I went to Australia in college, I carried along a dog-eared copy of a Lonely Planet book like it was my encyclopedia. It had all the best tips on cheap eats and places to stay that were inexpensive. Maybe I would have gotten a copy of Lonely Planet or some other guidebook like it for Las Vegas and seen what they recommended?
- Ask the audience: are there any other ways I could have used to find outdoor activities in Las Vegas before 1995?
- Of course, 1995 was almost twenty years ago. So, what would I do now? ALTOGETHER NOW… SAY IT
- I’d Google it of course. Does anyone know why I chose the year 1995? 1995 was the year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford. Page, who was only22 at the time, was a University of Michigan grad, and he was considering attending the school; Sergey, who was only 21, was assigned to show him around. In 1996, they began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. BackRub operated on Stanford servers for more than a year— but it eventually took up too much bandwidth. The domain name, Google.com, was registered as a domain on September 15, 1997. The name is a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. It reflected the Page and Brin's desire to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
- Now, I simply type “outdoor activities lasvegas” into Google and viola… millions of listings appear… 6,490,000 to be exact. So, now I’m hoping to head out to Red Rocks Canyon for a hike later today. So much more efficient, right?
- So, how did we get this point where Google is so central to how we find things and access information?
- Let me illustrate the rise of Google with three data snapshots.
- This is from Google themselves:"Every day Google answers more than one billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages. 15% of the searches we see everyday we’ve never seen before.“ one billion a day. There are only about 7 billion people on the planet and in many places, Google isn’t the dominant search engine… so that is a lot of searching.
- GoSquared is a real-time web analytics provider for thousands of businesses around the world. When Google went down for a few minutes on the 16th of August in 2013, they noticed a huge drop in traffic to the sites they monitor. A 40% drop! It was like the web was turned off for a few minutes.
- For ASHA’s website, the impact likely was higher. For January of this year, almost 60% of our traffic came from Google. It is by far the biggest referrer of traffic. Nothing else comes close.
- I’d like to pause here for a quick question. What are some other impacts of Google you’ve seen in your own business. Be brave.
- OK… At the same time that Google has taken on such a dominant role in our online life, what has been happening to the ROI or return on investment of traditional advertising?
- Can anyone see the difference between these two images? That is right…. The image on the right is not displaying any ads. That is because, I generally browse the web with an ad blocker plug-in turned on for my web browser. I almost never see display ads on any site I visit.
- Some studies are showing that up to 1/3 of web visitors are blocking ads. That is a big hit for banner display ad ROI. If someone doesn’t see your ad, it’s hard to get them to buy your product or visit your clinic.
- Quick story or maybe this is a confession? Back in high school in the 90’s,I was a telemarketer. Yes, I admit it. I got the job to save up for Spring Break my senior year. I sat in a smoky room of cubicles (smoking hadn’t yet been banned in all workplaces I guess) and I would call people and attempt to sell subscriptions to the Washington Post. Some of my colleagues were very good at this. I was not. But , every so often, to my great surprise… someone would actually decide to purchase a subscription. I got a commission when they did that and the whole system must have worked out for the Post’s bottom line or they probably wouldn’t have been doing it. I do suspect that selling subscriptions over the phone worked better then than it does now. That is because this device, caller ID, was introduced to most phones over the past decade or so.
- At the same time, the FTC implemented a Do Not Call Registry that had more than 209 million active registrations in 2011. I suspect the number is even higher now. It turns out that most people don’t really like it when people like me called them during the dinner time to sell them a newspaper subscription or something else. I haven’t gotten a call myself from the Washington Post in years. Maybe the numbers don’t add up anymore.
- And then caller ID (aka TiVo) for TVs came along and started messing with commercial television. Why would you want to sit through a commercial when you could just fast forward right through it?
- The broadcasters were obviously not happy about people skipping commercials and they sued Tivo. Just last year, the Ninth Circuit issued a landmark ruling that modern digital video recorders with the ability to automatically skip commercials are permitted under copyright's fair use doctrine. I’m not sure if they appealed, but the present practice of commercial skipping makes TV commercials a lot less valuable than they once were.
- Some people aren’t even watching commercially supported television any more at all. These are the so-called “cord cutters” of which I am one. The only commercial TV I tend to watch anymore is soccer… and lucky for me soccer games are presented commercial free. My kids really have no concept of commercials. When we happen to watch a live show (like the super bowl) that is interrupted by commercials it’s a total novelty to them.
- Netflix has obviously been the big player in this trend. I read a recent study by the online video tracking company Qwilt that said Netflix accounts for nearly one-third of all downstream internet traffic. Amazon, Apple, and Hulu are also trying to make a play for streaming video. This direct streaming option for consumers is a big disruptive force in how TV is consumed in the U.S.
- I’m not going to suggest that all the traditional ways to advertise to consumers and market your services have dried up like this billboard here. But, I am going to suggest that there are techniques available now that may be more cost effective for your business. They can complement your traditional techniques. At ASHA, I know we still find email is a very cost-effective way to generate business, so we’re not abandoning email anytime soon. I wouldn’t suggest that you do that either. I am going to suggest that you look at inbound marketing techniques to help augment the other traditional marketing you may doing for your business.
- Let’s first distinguish between outbound and inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is what we just discussed as traditional advertising or marketing. It is TV and radio commercials, print and digital display advertisements, cold calls, and so on. The key is that the advertiser initiates the interaction.
- Inbound marketing on the other hand, in the words of Lauren Drell from mashable “focuses on earning, not buying, a person's attention” She goes on to say that “This is done through social media and engaging content, such as blogs, podcasts and white papers. This content is interesting, informative and adds value, creating a positive connection in the eyes of the consumer, thus making him more likely to engage your brand and buy the product. So it costs less and has better a ROI."
- At its core, inbound marketing is all about content. Like Lauren Drell said, content may refer to a blog post, a white paper, a how-to guide, a webinar, a video, and so on. It is some form of digital asset that people will find useful.
- Imagine your website content as a giant magnet. You are trying to attract people to you, rather than push people to you.
- In my view, inbound marketing isn’t really new. The Web has simply made it much easier and cheaper. It’s also much more measurable and accurate.
- Let’s consider some examples of pre-web inbound activities and the related post-web technique you may want to try…. pre-web: Writing a book on a topic. Post-web: Writing a blog on a topic. Pre-web: Speaking at a community event or local conference. Post-web equivalent: Delivering a webinar and making it available on your website. Pre-web: Writing an article in a parenting magazine about infant hearing screening. Post-web: Writing a guest post on a parenting blog about infant hearing screening.
- I’d like to pause here for a quick question. Be brave.
- Alright… you think inbound marketing might be something you want to try. So, how do you get started?
- Like a lot of things online, it’s probably best to first determine what your goal is: Is it more product sales, more appointments, more subsribers? This is often called your “call to action.” You want to be able to quantify it. So, no squishy goals are allowed here… like “I want to put forward a more positive brand for my company.” That goal may be a good one, but it’s not going to be a good one for inbound marketing.
- I think Cortney Phillips, of Screwpile Communications, does a nice job of outlining the some of the most common goals for healthcare organizations. Make an appointment. Learn more. Join an email list. Follow you on social media. Sign up here for something – perhaps an event, or webinar. While “learn more” might sound a little squishy, you can measure the number of views that a specific page gets – if that is what you are after.
- I’d like to pause here for a quick question. Be brave.
- Once you know your goal, you can start creating your content and getting it out to as wide of an audience as possible. I’ll outline a simple 4 step process for doing that. The first step is to choose who you are trying to reach…
- The entire world should not be your audience. You want to be specific. “All healthcare consumers” is still too broad. Think more along the lines of: “older adults with hearing issues.” Or, “parents of young children that have a speech delay.” Refining your target audience further will help you when you get to the next step…
- Which is… define the need. What is the audience you are targeting looking for? If you don’t know, the odds are that you haven’t done a great job defining a specific enough audience.
- I always recommend that Audiologists and SLPs simply think about the questions that clients (or even friends and family) ask them all the time. The need doesn’t need to be overly complicated. In fact, you can probably answer the questions in your sleep.
- So, the two easiest steps are past you… now comes time to create the magnet, the actual content that will meet your audience’s need.
- I would remind you that you are an expert. Most people like me do not know what you know about communication disorders. Knowledge that you take for granted is likely to be extremely helpful to a lot of people. Unless you have decided to target an audience of other experts, you should re-assure yourself that what you create doesn’t need to be expert level and ready to publish in a scholarly journal.
- As you create your content, you’ll want to make sure that it is optimized for search. After all, the point of this content is for it to be found when people look for it using a search engine. Does anyone know what SEO stands for? Search Engine Optimization. In my view, there are some simple things you can do to make your content search engine friendly.
- The first thing is to create high quality content. In 2011, Google rolled out its so-called “Panda” update. I have no idea why they called it Panda? However… In their words, the Panda update was designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites like content farms – that appear to be written by robots, content that has been copied from other Websites or sites that are just not very useful.
- Yesterday someone asked what I meant by high quality content. I gave an answer at the time, but I went back and did some research to see what Google has to say on the matter. Google is obviously not interested in disclosing everything about its algorithm because that would allow you to game the system. However… in a post on their webmaster’s blog, they provide some questions that provide some guidance on how they've been looking at the issue.
- There were 23 questions, so I took the time to pull out the top ten questions I think would be most relevant to all of you. You can read the whole post yourself if you’d like to read them all. The questions they proposed are: Would you trust the information presented in this article? Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well? Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors? Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?”
- The other questions are: For a health related query, would you trust information from this site? Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?” Hopefully those questions give you a little bit more insight into what Google is looking for with respect to quality.
- When you are creating quality content, be sure to write good headings. In this example from the ASHA website, you can see we’ve broken down our consumer page on Dysarthria into about 10 sub-sections. Each sub-section has a heading to help people when they are scanning the pages. You want to make sure you tag the headings as such so machines can read the main sub-topics of your content.
- The next things you want to do is write a meaningful title and meta description. The title is what shows up in search results as the link. It is also what automatically shows up when you share your article on Facebook or you bookmark the page. The meta description is the summary of the article. This again may show up in the search results or on Facebook when you share the content. In my view, you don’t need to try cramming keywords into the title. You just want it to be clear and concise.
- Last, but, not least, you want to try giving your content a meaningful URL or web address. In the Dysarthria example, you can see a logic to the URL structure. It’s a page in our public section, under the category of speech disorders… and the page name is Dysarthria. I should mention that your publishing tool may or may not give you complete control over this. If it does, its probably in your best interest to edit what it spits out automatically.
- OK, so you have your quality content created. You now want to get it shared in the world. These days, that means you will probably want to distribute your content through some sort of social media channel.
- There are a lot of social platforms out there for you to choose from. Don’t try to use them all. Rather, I would suggest that you pick one or two that feel right for your business. They may be the platforms you are most comfortable with, or they may be the platforms where you think your target audience is. You just want to make sure that you are using a social platform that you will be able to keep updated. You don’t want it to look like no one is minding the store. This isn’t intended to be a social media session, but I’ll walk you through some of the main sites you may want to consider.
- Let’s start with Twitter
- I am sure you all have heard about Twitter. Who here uses it? For those of you who do not use it: This is the definition of Twitter from their own About page. I’m sure you also know that Twitter limits messages to 140 characters or less.
- Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in 2006. This is an original sketch that one of the founders, Jack Dorsey created of the interface.
- At 3:50pm on March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the first tweet. The reason the name here has no vowels because they were original limited to a 5 character SMS shortcode.
- According to Pew Research Center,Twitter is the fourth most used social network worldwide (behind Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest). It has a massive amount of active users.
- Twitter is wildly popular, but its something that requires some time to understand. It might be a great tool for your business if you are already familiar with using it.
- As you start to connect with colleagues on Twitter, you’ll get to see how some people do a more effective job of sharing useful information. Some people less so. You will probably choose to continue to follow the people that share useful information. You want to be one of those accounts.
- I had to share some baby photos in this session…
- My oldest daughter Clara, was born on July 17, 2005. I wanted to share a photo of her… so what did I do?
- I sent an email, of course. I had all my friends and family addresses in my gmail account and I sent out a massive Bcc email to everyone. It was fun to get the replies.
- My youngest daughter, Valerie, was born on May 28, 2009. I had a son, Victor in the middle by the way – that is the boy sitting there. I wanted to share a photo of Valerie… so what did I do in 2009?
- I shared the photo on Facebook, of course. This time, all my friends and family were on Facebook and they all liked and commented on the photos.
- It is hard to apply too many superlatives to Facebook. According to them, "On average more than 350 million photos per day were uploaded to Facebook in the fourth quarter of 2012. Over 240 billion photos have been shared on Facebook.“ I often wonder how many of those 240 billion are baby photos.
- Facebook had 757 million daily active users on average in December 2013.
- When I started working at ASHA in 2005, NIH was our #1 referring site (aside from search engines). Over the past several years, Facebook has leaped ahead. Pinterest and Twitter have also moved ahead.
- If you regularly use Facebook , you can consider setting up a Facebook page for your practice. Setting up a Facebook page takes just a few minutes and Facebook has spent a lot of time adding more and more tools to help you manage your page. Not only can you fill in detailed information, logo, etc., you can also gather ratings, post photos, promote events, etc.
- For page administrators, the reporting tool, Facebook Insights gives you detailed data on your audience and on how engaging people find your posts. This a snapshot from the ASHA Facebook page insights. It shows post likes, reach, and engagement. It’s gotten better and better over the years.
- Google+ is Google’s 2011entry into the field of social networking. Like Facebook, you can create individual profiles or business/brand pages.
- Are you noticing a pattern… also like Facebook, you can develop followers, post content, and share photos.
- The cool thing about Google+ pages is that they act like free advertising for your business in search results. Google is integrating Google+ into more and more of its products and services. It may a venue for you to consider.
- Another obvious venue is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been slowly, but surely growing over the years. They now claim to have 277 million members in 200 countries and territories around the globe. They have also been working on enhancing what they call their “company pages” that businesses can use.
- Company pages act in the similar way to Facebook and Google+. You can gather followers and share content (esp. jobs). Since LinkedIn is basically a giant pool of resumes it might be particularly suited to organizations that are trying to do a lot of recruitment activities.
- Pinterestis another social media tool that has become very popular for sharing activities for kids. In January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique users, making it the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. You can act as a curator and pin content that you think might be of interest to consumers.
- OK, we’ve walked through choosing an audience, defining a need, creating quality content. We’ve also discussed some of major social channels you might use to distribute and promote your content. Let’s see some examples of this approach in action. I should mention that these are examples I have found on the web by searching! I have no idea if these sites used the process I am describing, but I think we can imagine the development of the content through the steps I’ve outlined. No matter what, these sites have done a good job getting their content recognized online.
- For the first example, the audience is Parents of Toddlers that may need feeding therapy. The need is When should you pursue feeding therapy for your toddler?. The content is going to be a guest post on a Friendship Circle Special Needs blog. The content will be distributed through a Facebook Page, Pinterest, Twitter, SEO.
- Here is the blog post. It’s a little hard to see here, but there is a link to Melanie Potock’s site on feeding therapy… from there, she has several calls to action.
- As I mentioned, the same article is distributed through a Facebook Page, Pinterest, and Twitter. This helps people discover the content and perhaps comment on it or link to it from other sites.
- Now, when you search Google for “signs toddler needs feeding therapy” you find Melanie’s post.
- Let’s do one more. In this example, the audience is Parents of Older Internationally Adopted Children. The need or question is “What are speech and language delays in internationally adopted older children?” The content is a blog post on the practitioner site, that was originally published in an adoption magazine. The content is distributed by Facebook Page and Pinterest and its enhanced by good SEO practices.
- Here is the blog post on the Smart Speech Therapy website. The calls of action are available in the left column: follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Subscribe to our newsletter.
- Like I mentioned, the content is distributed by Facebook post and its pinned on Pinterest.
- So now when you search for “what are speech language delays in internationally adopted children?” the blog post is the number 4 result.
- Ok, let’s pause for a moment to let you take a few minutes and give it a shot on your own.
- Walk through the steps of choosing a targeted audience, defining the need of that target audience. You don’t need to write the content, but imagine what content you would create. It doesn’t need to be a blog post. It could also be a video or a podcast. Then, take a moment to think about where you would distribute the content. You may not have the social presence now, so it can be where you want to develop one. We’ll take 3-5 minutes and then I’d love for someone to be willing to share. I can walk around and answer questions you may have as you are doing it.
- For the last part of my presentation, I want to talk about measurement. The great thing about inbound marketing is that it is highly measurable.
- So, how do you measure results? The answer is that you need to use some sort of web analytics package.
- I have the most experience using Google Analytics. If you haven’t used it, I would recommend it to small businesses. It is free and it’s got a lot of great features.
- Let’s talk about the concept of conversion in the web analytics world. There are three basic pieces to the puzzle. The first is what is referred to as a landing page. This can be any page that people land on for your site. It could be a blog post, your homepage and so on. The next piece is what’s referred to as a conversion funnel. A “conversion funnel” can be a series of simple steps or a single step that is required to complete your call to action – the goal that you decided on as the beginning of the process. A conversion is complete, when a person walks through the steps and gets to a final destination. This might be an order confirmation page or a subscription confirmation page.
- The conversion funnel can be quite short. It may just be one step. In this example, we want people to sign up for our email newsletter. So, the person might land on one of your well written blog posts. Because your content is so helpful, they would be called to filled out your email subscription form with their email address and the conversion is complete when they land on a confirmation page indicating that they successfully subscribed.
- The conversion funnel can also consist of multiple steps. For the ASHA store, the landing page might be a product page. The funnel consists of two main steps: filling out your shipping & billing information and payment information. The conversion is complete when you get to the order confirmation page.
- After you know what your conversion pattern looks like, you can set it up in Google as a goal. Let’s take the example from the ASHA Store. The final destination, entered at the top is the order confirmation page. I also set up an optional funnel of steps for the shipping & billing page and the payment page. You don’t have to create the funnel, but it may be helpful as I’ll show you on the next slide.
- Once you have the goal set up, you can start tracking. If you set up a funnel of steps, you can see how people proceed through each step. In the case of the ASHA Store over the past couple of weeks, you can see that 617 people started the conversion funnel and 503 finished. You can see where people exited along the way. There are always going to be some people stopping along the way, but a funnel may help you identify pain points in the process. If you see a lot of people getting to your email subscription form are abandoning, maybe you could consider reducing the number of fields of data you ask for.
- The main point of setting up the goal is that you can start tracking to see how people are converting on your site. You could look to see what keywords people are searching for that are driving conversions.
- You can also see what landing pages are driving your conversion rate. You may find yourself surprised by what you learn. Maybe a piece of content that you didn’t think was all that great is driving a lot of conversion because it fulfills some sort of search niche that your site filled. When you know what your most popular landing pages are for conversion, you can work to optimize them. You can maybe make changes to make it even easier to convert. At the very least, you want to avoid deleting them or moving them.
- You could spend all day learning about Google Analytics. I’ve only touched on it here today. If you are interested in reading more, I highly recommend the AvinashKaushik’s blog… which is called Occam’s Razor. It’s an excellent source of information on measuring your online presence.
- Let’s summarize what we have covered: 1- People are searching for answers online.2-Traditional advertising may not be generating the same ROI that it once was. 3. Unlike outbound marketing, Inbound marketing focuses on earning a person's attention.“ - Lauren Drell, Mashable4 Start your inbound process by first defining (measureable) success. 5 Then,Follow four basic steps when creating your content: 1-Choose an Audience, 2-Define the Need, 3-Create the Content, and then 4-Distribute and Promote It. Lastly it’s important to measure to see what is working.
- OK, I want to close on this quote from HubSpot CEO, Brian Halligan. The world is evolving and we all need to adapt our marketing efforts to meet the changing needs of our customers. My simple advice is to: Answer questions, add value, and then measure the results of your efforts.
- Ok, we are at the end of my prepared presentation. I want to mention again that you can access the slides from Slideshare. And now, I’d like to open things up for questions.