You’ll find guidance on:
Need help updating already published content? Review our quick tips for content governance during a crisis, or reach out to Geonetric’s expert healthcare writers for assistance.
Geonetric’s Chief Strategy Officer, Ben Dillon, will be joined by experts from a range of healthcare marketing disciplines to provide guidance and actionable recommendations for the road ahead.
Attendees will learn:
Follow our COVID-19 communications pointers for strategic, empathetic messaging in your website content and other marketing assets.
In all your communications during this challenging time, make compassion the centerpiece of your messaging. There will be a time for more traditional marketing when the threat of the pandemic passes. What’s always true — yesterday, today, and tomorrow — is content that recognizes its audience’s emotional state and responds to it with a positive tone and helpful solutions not only leaves readers feeling more at ease, it can increase brand loyalty.
Check out Geonetric’s free COVID-19 resources or contact us today for content strategy and development services and SEO support.
During a public health crisis like the COVID-19 virus pandemic, people want to learn how to stay safe and healthy, and how to get care when they need it. Many are turning to their local hospitals and health systems for that information.
In fact, a Geonetric consumer survey, 33% said their trust in their local health system has increased or strongly increased during the pandemic.
Part of where this information seeking and trust is happening is on social media.
According to a New York Times analysis, social media, in particular, has seen a rapid increase in use during the social distancing, shelter-in-place, and self-isolation of the pandemic. More specifically, Facebook has seen a 27% traffic increase in desktop users and a 1.1% traffic increase in Facebook app users.
Social media gives your team a direct-to-consumer channel to engage audiences. Tools like Facebook and Instagram let you use images, videos, stories, and text-based posts to connect in real-time with people who have questions and concerns you can address.
As you engage your audience on social, keep an eye on the trending questions and concerns from your community, such as:
Questions coming from real people also open doors for other content marketing for your audience, and provide a supportive, educational perspective that people need.
If you aren’t sure what to post, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention has created a free social media toolkit with copy, images, and infographics to share with your followers.
During a crisis like this, your community and colleagues are facing uncertainty and anxiety. This puts you – as a healthcare marketer – in a distinct position to guide, educate, and help. In times like this, it’s more important that you act as a neighbor, not as a brand.
Beyond sharing health and wellness tips, evolving updates, and other newsworthy information, you can foster empathy with social media marketing by sharing stories inside and outside your walls, including
Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, shared photos of staff wearing donated masks across their social channels. The posts also linked to their website for more information about making donations.
The language and images you use in your posts are important to your audience. Engage tips on how to write for the web and use social media, and apply them to your posts:
According to a study from Sprout Social, the optimal day and time to post vary by platform. It’s important to note that these recommended times to post on social platforms are based on pre-pandemic circumstances but can be used as a good benchmark to begin with and optimize as times proceeds.
Such benchmarks can help you reach more people by posting on the right channel at the right time – and take advantage of specific features and tools.
For the healthcare industry, Facebook sees the most engagement on Wednesdays from 10:00 a.m. to noon. The typical business workweek also gives reliable times for engagement from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Facebook implemented features for business pages to publish business hour updates and service changes. As Google My Business and Bing Places have done, Facebook lets businesses make updates including:
The best time to post on Instagram for the healthcare industry falls on Tuesdays at around 8:00 a.m. Incorporate trending crisis-related hashtags, such as #flattenthecurve, #stayhome, and #quarantineandchill, into your content in an appropriate and tasteful way.
Use Instagram to provide educational content that points viewers to your website for up-to-date and credible information. Don’t shy away from using Instagram to share inspirational content to give viewers that glimmer of hope they need.
Top times in the healthcare industry to post on Twitter are on Wednesdays from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Other weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. have also proven to show reliable engagement.
Twitter recommends using images and videos to attract users and reach a wider audience. Consider using threads for status updates and restrictions that just don’t fit into Twitter’s allotted 280-character posts.
With LinkedIn’s target audience being primarily professional users, the best times to post occur during the workweek, Tuesday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Amid the coronavirus outbreak, LinkedIn has increased efforts to assist organizations and communities dealing with the impact of the pandemic, including offering free job postings. This service — available through June 30, 2020 — receives additional promotion from LinkedIn to highly relevant candidates through the “Urgently Hiring” job category.
The best time to post on YouTube falls during weekdays from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Views tend to peak during the weekday evening hours, so by posting in that window, you’ll have plenty of time for your video to be processed and indexed by Google.
Optimize your videos with accurate titles, descriptions, tagging, and transcription. When possible, include relevant keywords in the video title and description to attract search users.
Video content that is educational, inspirational, and helpful is a great resource for viewers.
Posting on optimal days and times is a good starting point for any organization to engage on social media. After you’ve built a solid foundation of followers and engagement, check your channels’ insights and analytics.
These data points help you analyze when your page’s target audience is engaging most with your content. This strategy is especially important to utilize during the COVID-19 virus. With limited data right now on optimum times to post, it’s more important than ever before to look at your own social media metrics. Take these findings and adjust your schedule and content calendar.
Social media marketing metrics you should measure fall into three primary categories:
You can typically find this information through each social platform’s insights/analytics tool.
Tools like Google Analytics and UTM parameters aid in tracking how social media drives traffic to your site. UTMs allow you to tag links to track which social platform is bringing the most visitors and how those visitors are engaging with your site.
Your social media presence can be a source of relief for some or a source of hope for others. Take your position in times like these as an opportunity to connect with your community beyond providing care in your clinics. This is a perfect chance to extend empathy and provide outstanding support during a difficult time for everyone.
If you’re not sure how to set up your social media analytics and tracking, or you need help building social posts and campaigns during the pandemic, reach out to Geonetric to get started.
The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially changed daily life. To help healthcare marketers across the country better understand how this new reality intersects with people’s healthcare experiences, Geonetric conducted an online survey of 600 internet users across the U.S. The surveys were completed April 3, 2020.
Learn how COVID-19 has affected consumers’ decision-making around healthcare as well as how they are responding to different types of communication from health systems. See data on how COVID-19 has:
Your health consumers need information from you right now. Whether it’s details on symptoms, treatments, telehealth, making masks, how to clean their home, protecting their families, making donations … the list goes on. And they need information from a source they can trust – you.
You’re probably creating some of this great content, but are you emailing it? People are turning to their inbox now more than ever. According to research by Paved, open rates were up 15% worldwide through March.
As you get ready to hit send and share vital information via email, here are six tips to make sure you are being as effective as you can in this new landscape.
Ask any email marketer (experts at Litmus and MailChimp included) and they’ll tell you – email marketing best practices are changing and changing fast. For example, your old send times and days may not be the most effective anymore, now that many people are working from home and looking for information from experts at different, more varied times. For example, according to WorldData, before March, 8:00 – 9:00 a.m. was the best time to send email, but from March 20 to April 1, that time has moved to 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Also keep in mind is that although your instinct may be to stop email communication, people are turning to their inbox now more than ever – they want to hear from you there. It’s important to keep your communication cadence, while paying attention to your analytics to make any needed adjustments.
Pay close attention to the words your subscribers are using on your site as well as Google Trends data and keep an eye on the changing use of words that are making an impact in the broader email landscape.
For example, using COVID-19 is not recommended in subject lines of emails. Not only are users burnt out after all of the commercial emails providing “A Letter From Our CEO on COVID-19,” but also there’s already spam being spun up utilizing that term. Using this term scarcely in subject lines and instead using terms like Coronavirus, pandemic, epidemic, etc., will help you avoid getting flagged as spam. This is just one of the new terms that you need to pay attention to trends on. Resources like subjectline.com are a great way to check on recent trends and help you improve deliverability and open rates.
Believe it or not, surveys are also popular during this time! Users want to understand how they’ll benefit from giving you their time to take the survey more than ever. So consider asking your subscribers what information they want from you and make it clear that their feedback will inform the details you’re sharing with them.
If you already have a regular newsletter, consider reaching out to those subscribers and asking them directly to complete a short survey about the types of information they’re looking for you to share. Maybe your subscribers are burned out on hand-washing information but they want to know how to stay mentally healthy while at home. You can use their responses to plan your content marketing mix to meet those needs and send out new, requested content to your subscribers.
Segmentation has never been more important for your email subscribers and you. Your new and expectant mothers, for example, have totally different needs than your foundation donors. Meet each of your audiences where they’re at and provide the information they will benefit most from hearing.
For example, if you do have an email segment for your foundation donors, consider telling them how donating now directly impacts your ability to address COVID-19. Whether it’s funding PPE or making sure there’s little to no interruption of care, this audience will want to know how their contributions are helping in this challenging time, and it may even spur them to give more.
As a healthcare marketer, compassion is probably top of mind for you frequently. That’s more important now than ever. Language, images, phrasing, it all goes into reassuring your subscribers that, while taking COVID-19 seriously is necessary, we’re in this together and we will find a way through.
One way you can do that is providing content that helps them make the best of their new normal. Consider stories on topics like:
You can address the new needs of your subscribers and assure them they can rely on you.
Have you been seeing success with treating COVID-19 cases? Are you recognizing your hard-working frontline staff? Has your community made generous donations of meals or PPE supplies? These stories of connection and encouragement are all happening, despite how hard things are right now. Take the time to recognize and celebrate all the wonderful stories happening in your community and share them with your subscribers, too.
Email is an important part of your crisis communication plan. As you create new content for your social and website platforms, don’t forget to use email to connect and engage with subscribers who want to hear from you.
Do you need help figuring out your email mix or want some help reviewing your email plan? Or are you just getting started with email marketing? Contact Geonetric and get support from our experts.
Join us as Ben Dillon, Chief Strategy Officer at Geonetric and David Sturtz, Vice President of Business Development at Geonetric, discuss findings from the survey.
In addition, Joy Weller, Manager of Digital Media and Marketing at EvergreenHealth (Kirkland, WA), Christina Peaslee, Executive Director of Marketing Communications and Content Strategy at Cape Cod Healthcare (Hyannis, MA), and Darren Moore, Digital Content and Brand Manager at LMH Health (Lawrence, KS), will be joining us to share how their organizations are tackling COVID-19 communication on the web and what are the next priorities for their teams.
Watch on-demand and learn:
COVID-19 has thrust healthcare workers into the spotlight like never before. We’re all feeling vulnerable, and there’s surging interest in the people we rely on to take care of us.
Social media posts by medical professionals have gone viral. An Iowa nurse’s posts describing what it’s like to work on the pandemic frontlines were shared tens of thousands of times and received over 1 million likes, including from actress Liv Tyler. News outlets regularly carry stories about health professionals working tirelessly to save lives, and it’s common to hear references to “healthcare heroes.”
Your own employees’ first-person narratives can powerfully reinforce the basic information you’ve shared about how patients can help stop the spread of coronavirus. It’s invaluable for your external audiences to hear about how their actions may impact a nurse or doctor with a face and name. And when patients see medical professionals’ dedication and commitment, they’ll feel reassured someone will be there to care for their family, if needed.
Inside your organization, employees benefit from hearing the stories of their colleagues. Your organization has told them how to do their jobs safely and effectively, but personal narratives can fill a need that’s just as vital — the drive for human connection during a crisis. Workers want to know how their colleagues in different roles, departments, and buildings are coping. Most importantly in this time of social distancing, everyone wants to know they’re not alone.
Consider soliciting first-person content about topics like:
Post content that’s most relevant to other employees on an internal forum, like your intranet. Share information that’s appropriate for the public on your content marketing hub, crisis resource hub, and social media.
Tidelands Health published a story about the work of critical care nurses during COVID-19 and included photos of care professionals the community doesn’t normally get to see. The article quoted a nurse explaining what keeps her motivated: “I got into this job because of my love of caring for other people,” she said. “Running away is not really an option.”
But you don’t need a full article to get the message across. On Mercy Cedar Rapids’ Facebook page, the organization shared a physician’s photo of the emergency department team, along with his words of pride about the work they’ve been doing. It was one of Mercy Cedar Rapids’ most popular recent photos. The community posted hundreds of thankful comments in response, giving the medical team valuable encouragement.
Consider making a social media post like this with a photo and a few words from a different employee each day for a week. Or:
Yes, your healthcare employees are swamped. But some will still want to take time to make their voices heard. Telling stories can be a therapeutic form of stress relief.
And you don’t need a polished, five-minute video or 1,000-word blog post to leave an impact. Especially in times like this, audiences care more about the message than the production value.
Need help getting started? Contact Geonetric. Our experts can help you tell the stories of your “healthcare heroes” and galvanize support for your organization.
A recent NRC Health survey found that 43% of people are turning to their local hospital or health system for information about the coronavirus. But what does that mean in the face of a public health crisis, such as the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic?
At Geonetric, we define content marketing as a strategic approach to create valuable, relevant, and consistent digital content with the goal of stimulating your audience and helping connect them with your brand. It means you have the chance to connect with your community with educational, informative content that helps them stay healthy.
Rather than focusing on driving conversions and appointments, use this time of crisis to create content that shares empathy, provides guidance, and tempers anxieties.
For example, you might consider articles about:
Your patients and community members have many questions during a healthcare crisis, and some of them might be coming in to your front-line staff on the phone or in the clinics.
Ask your team members what they’ve heard and brainstorm potential content marketing assets to respond, such as:
If the answer isn’t robust enough to warrant a content marketing article, podcast, or video, consider adding it to a neatly organized FAQ section of your crisis communication hub.
In times of healthcare crisis, people want information they can trust. Invite your doctors and medical specialists to be part of your content creation as experts.
This could be in the form of a live Facebook video, or perhaps a question-and-answer-format blog post about myths and truths of the crisis. University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics hosted a live Q & A session on Facebook to answer questions and concerns from their followers.
It’s not just infectious disease experts that people want to hear from during a pandemic. Consider inviting your mental health professionals, nurses, dieticians, obstetricians, and physical therapists to provide information for various audiences on how to stay healthy.
Once new articles and assets are published on your website or content marketing hub, get them ready to share across:
If you follow the advice provided here, you’ll be spinning up lots of content. You’ll be answering questions and concerns, directing traffic for a community in need, and fulfilling requests from stakeholders to keep your audience informed. That’s why it’s so important to have a solid crisis content governance plan in place.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, social media and search engines have seen a spike in traffic. Not just because more people are online, working remotely, and socializing digitally, but also because people are trying to learn everything they can about the virus.
As a healthcare marketer, you’ll want to seek out the types of queries people have about the crisis. You can start with your own social media accounts, by reviewing comments and questions people have left on your page or to your account.
You can also explore tools like Google Trends, which gives you glimpses into popular and on-the-rise searches. Likewise, Google Search Console and your website’s internal site search can help you understand what crisis-related information your site visitors are looking for.
If you’re ready to put your content marketing to work during a crisis, but aren’t sure where to start, reach out to Geonetric. You’ll work with expert content strategists, writers, and developers who can help you build content marketing assets or a branded content marketing hub to support your marketing efforts, patients, and communities.
COVID-19 has introduced a new lexicon to our communities. Make communicating about the new virus and an unprecedented public health situation easier by creating an addendum to your style guide and sharing it across your organization.
Editorial style guides help your team develop content that’s clear, accurate, consistent, and reflective of your brand. If your team already has a style guide, it likely includes guidance around voice and tone, grammar, punctuation, formatting, and tricky words.
Consider adding entries on:
Need help? Review The Associated Press Stylebook’s new entry on coronaviruses.
Build a crisis resource hub. The hub makes it easy for people to access information, and it also makes managing content easier for your marketing and communications team.
Consider two hubs — one on your internet for external audiences and another on your intranet for internal audiences.
In the early days of a crisis, adrenaline may keep your team fueled through a surge of urgent communications. But as the initial phase passes, the need for communication stays steady, so streamline your workflow as much possible.
For general COVID-19 information, link to reputable national resources, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You can even embed their public health media library content about the coronavirus on your own site. This lets you connect your website visitors with accurate, up-to-date information while saving you and your stakeholders time.
Focus your time, and the time of your stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs), on content that’s specific to your organization or community. When sending content for internal review, help your SMEs provide efficient, effective feedback by giving clear expectations around the purpose of the content you’re creating, their role, and the deadline for their input.
As news breaks, recommendations are updated, policies change, classes and events move online, and volunteer or donation needs evolve, your team is creating a lot of content.
Make sure your community is seeing — and acting on — the most current information by establishing a crisis content review process.
It may not be realistic to review every page of COVID-19-related content every day. So set a schedule to review higher-priority content often, and other content less frequently.
For example, you may set schedules to review:
Create a plan that fits your content needs and your team’s capacity.
Document your plan, and then use a spreadsheet to keep track of:
Need help managing your COVID-19 content — or the hundreds of other web pages you’re responsible for? Geonetric’s healthcare writers and content strategists can help. Let us know how we can jump in as an extension of your team so you can meet your short-term and long-term marketing and communications goals.