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Showing posts from December, 2010

Marketing Automation: Keys to Success

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Of the 235 respondents in a November IDC survey, nearly 40% had not implemented a marketing automation solution (yet). Not implementing a marketing automation solution may be the ultimate career limiting move for today's marketers. Digital marketing has exploded in scope and complexity making it practically impossible to efficiently and effectively reach your target audience without a fully realized marketing automation infrastructure. If you haven't gotten started you are already way behind the ball. 40% have not yet implemented marketing automation Source: Marketing Automation: the Rise of Revenue, IDC #255860, Dec 2010 . n = 234 Marketing automation is a must have for today's marketing and sales organizations. There is a wide array of online sources readily available to buyers that can significantly influence purchasing behavior. As a result, marketers must maintain a pervasive and continuously refreshing digital presence. Frequency is emerging as the most critical capab

Healthcare Marketing Resolutions for 2011

It has been a most interesting healthcare year. One filled with great change by the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, large fraud settlements along with the usually ethical and moral failures, mergers, acquisitions and the glimmer of an economic recovery. There is optimistic hope for the future. Enough said as all the major healthcare publications run their year-end retrospectives, tops tens, best and worst…. well, you get the idea. So before I going to much further, I would like to extend a most sincere wish for a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers around the world. Readership of Healthcare Marketing Matters has increased greatly over this past year to over a 1,000 page views a month and read daily world-wide. I hope that you have found these writings to be informative, maybe even educational and occasionally irreverent. But most of all, thank you for reading and commenting. So my last Healthcare Marketing Matters blog for 2010 is about

Dreamforce '10 - the don't Miss Event of the Year … for CIOs

Salesforce.com held its annual user conference December 6th to 9th in San Francisco. It was unusual in that very little of the messaging from Salesforce.com itself was aimed at sales people. The company has clearly and emphatically hammered its stake in the ground as the cloud platform provider for the enterprise. Marc Benioff and other top SFDC execs spent all of the general session keynotes on four key ideas: Platform Cloud Social Mobile If that were a word cloud of the transcripts of the keynotes "platform" would be the biggest and boldest of the four. The company made several significant announcements about how it is enhancing and building out the enterprise cloud computing platform of the future – much of it aimed at CIOs and developers. First however, there were a couple of items that will be of interest to sales and marketing people: Full integration of Jigsaw. Jigsaw, the "crowdsourced" contact database will now provide dynamic updates to records, greatly re

Using QR Codes in Healthcare Marketing

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Have you ever considered using Quick Response(QR)Codes in your healthcare marketing? Do you even know what a QR Code is? For those who may be unfamiliar with QR codes , they were developed by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994 for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing. It is called QR Code for Quick Response Code because it is intended for its content to be decoded at high-speed. The QR Code is a two-dimensional code consisting of black modules arranged in a square on white background. It is readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera and smartphones. QR Code™ is a registered trademark of Denso Wave Incorporated. QR Codes are used with regularity in marketing in most other parts of the world.  The U. S. lags in use. Its About Convenience This is really a convenience application aimed at mobile phone users. And I think it has great application for use in the healthcare industry. Mobile-tagging as it is called, provides you the ability to communicate information to a

Using Healthcare Focused Webinars to Drive Revenue

Recently, I have been seeing a large amount of advertising directing individuals to come to a hospital or physicians office, clinic etc., at a specific date and time, usually at the physicians or clinicians convenience, for a health and wellness program. That is so 1990s. In this day and age, with internet savvy audiences and patients who are networked to the web, social media, information and such, it seems silly that most healthcare providers would continue to offer only one way for individuals to access health and wellness programs. If you're not using webinars, then you're not meeting your customers needs. And it's pretty easy to do. Using WebEx, Talk Ready, Go To Meeting for example, a 30-45 minute health and wellness seminar can be given on a day and tme more convenient for your audience. They can be recorded and archived on your web site for consumer play back at anytime of their choosing. You now begin to build up a library of self-generated health information that

The Changing Role of Healthcare Marketing

Much has changed in 2010. One could say a titanic shift that has created a tsunami that is in its early stages of being felt. With that in mind, it begs the question of what is, or will be the role of healthcare marketing going forward? Healthcare reform simply will not be repealed. Adjustments will be made and the legal challenges will continue to be filed for several years, but overall repeal is a distant dream of the far conservative right. Despite the public pronouncements, a significant amount of money in the billions of dollars in future revenue and earnings is at stake for all the players to allow for regression. In a time where the majority of individuals and families have some form of health insurance, I believe that marketing will have a role to play that is much different and more important than today . In an age of healthcare consumerism with patients controlling their health information, (and yes individual health information is the property of the patient, not of the