by Ken Krause | Jun 9, 2016 | Blog
It’s happened to me. It’s happened to my friends. Sooner or later it happens to just about everyone in marketing communications. Someone (usually someone who doesn’t have to execute it) decides, “Hey, let’s create a marketing newsletter!” and the next thing you know it’s your job to pull it together out of cotton candy and unicorns.
In the era of Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and a million other social media applications, an email newsletter may seem quaint. “Someone needs to update their marketing playbook,” you think. But the reality is email newsletter are still highly effective. Like 95% effective if they are done right.
That’s the key, isn’t it? Because newsletters can be time-consuming, especially if content is tough to come by, they are generally handed off to the newbie, or the least experienced member of the team, or the person who just doesn’t know how to say no.
It doesn’t have to be as heinous of a chore as it may seem. In fact, it can be rather fun if you approach it the right way. Here are a few suggestions for not only taking the pain out of producing a newsletter but creating a finished product you’ll be proud to send to your customers and prospects.
Keep it simple
One of the most common newsletter mistakes is thinking you’re publishing the New York Times Sunday edition, i.e., stuffing it chock full of too many articles. Keep in mind who your readers are and how they’re consuming the content.
These days, many are opening the newsletter on their smartphones. With roughly 4-7 inches of screen space, too many stories too little readership. Offering two or three in-depth articles supplemented by shorter, easily consumable content (see the next section) will be easier on the eyes and will keep readers from becoming easily overwhelmed.
Keeping it simple solves another dilemma every marketer has experienced with a newsletter at one time or another: the first issue comes out on time to great huzzahs. The second issue comes out a couple of weeks late, and the third issue never sees the light of day.
Keeping the number of stories lower helps ensure there’s plenty of fodder for the next issue. Besides, it’s a lot easier to herd three cats, er, subject matter experts, at a time than six or eight. Especially if you’re “managing up.”
Mix in “snackable” content
Yes, you have some great thought leadership to share, and it can only be delivered in a longer article. After all, you want your audience to be informed.
Sometimes, though, people think they don’t have time to read a longer article. If you include fun, entertaining and/or informative content that can be consumed at a glance (like grabbing a handful of M&Ms you can chew and swallow quickly so no one knows you’re cheating on the diet) your readers will be more likely to open the newsletter to give those pieces a look.
While they’re there, they may decide they might have enough time to read one of the more in-depth pieces. Why not? The newsletter is already open anyway.
Fun facts, trivia or statistics related to your industry (even better your area of it) are always welcome. For example, if your business involves blood transfusions, you could share that the first recorded successful blood transfusion was in 1665. Or that nearly 21 million blood components are transfused each year in the U.S. Anything that will make your audience stop for a second and say “Hmmm.”
Quotes from famous people are another great source of snackable content. Even an infographic can work, as long as you keep it simple. Give readers something they can view quickly (and find interesting) and you’ll make opening your newsletter habit-forming.
Include graphics
Nothing says uninviting (or “hard to read”) like wall-to-wall type. Look for ways to include graphics as part of your stories.
Maybe it’s a photo of the author. Maybe it’s a relevant illustration or photo. Maybe it’s a cartoon if you have someone on staff who likes to draw. Find a way to include some graphics and you’ll improve the look. Just be sure they don’t also slow down how quickly the newsletter loads.
Focus on them, not you
Let’s face it ” we live in a very “me”-oriented society. The old acronym WIIFM “what’s in it for me? ” applies now more than ever. So if your newsletter is all about your product, your services and your company, it’s going to be of very little interest to anyone outside the company.
Think about what happens at a party or other gathering where people cobble together posters filled with pictures of the guest of honor. The first thing visitors do when they look at the photos is check to see if they are in them. (Ok, maybe it’s just me who does that.)
Keep the “Inside Baseball” stuff to a minimum unless this is an internal company newsletter. Offer up information that will help readers do their jobs better, or improve their relationships with a boss or co-workers, or enjoy their leisure time more. Anything that offers a promise of making the reader smarter or happier or better-prepared in some aspect of their lives.
That doesn’t mean you can’t include something about your company and its products or services now and then, especially if you have a truly exciting announcement. But be careful, because the more readers perceive the newsletter is about you instead of them, the less motivated they will be to read it. Or even open it.
Keep the language friendly but genuine
There is always a temptation, especially among those who are new to writing, to try to show off their college or post-graduate educations by creating deadly serious tomes that read like textbooks. Remember how much fun textbooks were to read?
If you want to get your audience engaged with your newsletter on a regular basis, write it more like a friend sharing great information with another friend. As a general rule, newsletter articles should be conversational, much like a blog post. In fact, this blog post by my colleague Michelle Noteboom offers some great tips that apply to newsletter articles as much as they do blogs. Not to mention an example of writing style.
At the same time, you also want to be genuine in your writing. If you’re ghost writing for a company executive who is known to be rather dry or formal in their day-to-day life, suddenly adopting a breezy attitude in a newsletter article will immediately scream FALSE and hurt the credibility of the article and the newsletter.
For more down-to-earth types, however, you can inject some fun. Find out what their hobbies and interests are and tie them in if you can. Keep sentences and paragraphs short again a must for those reading on smartphones. The easier the story is to read and comprehend, the more likely it is to make a lasting impression.
Not so bad
See? Being in charge of the newsletter isn’t so bad. And the more you do it, the easier it will get. Before you know it you’ll be the one doling out advice and shaking your head at every bad newsletter you get.
Have you ever been in charge of a newsletter? What has your experience been? Is there anything you would change about what I suggested? Or anything you would change in your approach for the next time?
by Matt Schlossberg | May 27, 2016 | Blog
Contributing a bylined article in a print or online healthcare publication is one of the best ways to up your PR/marketing game by building your organization’s reputation as a credible information source and bringing attention to your capabilities as a solutions provider.
Here’s what the research tells us:
- Earned media is the most trusted form of advertising. (Nielsen, 2013.)
- Lead-generation driven by earned media outperforms lead generation driven by paid media by 10-15%. (Conductor, 2014.)
- 70% of consumers want to learn about products through content, rather than traditional advertisements. (Inc., 2015.)
In addition to its stellar performance against traditional marketing and advertising tactics, earned media bylines have the potential to enhance every facet of your current PR and marketing efforts.
Think of vendor-neutral, solutions-agnostic bylines as the stock base of a really great soup or stew. Home cooks and professional chefs use these flavorful stock compounds to enhance countless dishes. Similarly, contributed articles can refitted to enhance any number of PR and marketing vehicles, including social media and blog posts, white papers, and case studies. Positive coverage that earned contributions garner can also be a stepping stone to encouraging existing customers to participate in media interviews or as co-authors on future articles.
They can also serve as key collateral for your organization’s sales team. IGD Enterprise notes that 74% of technology influencers and decision-makers turn first to third-party content sites for information on vendors and solutions in order to develop RPFs or RFIs. A glossy reprint or simple PDF of a contributed article is a great for prospects seeking additional information and validation on your solutions and services.
Producing regular bylines will help you build lasting relationships with editors and the audience their publications reach. I helped a client develop an editorial calendar that included topics and targeted publications. After three or four placements, we found that we no longer had to solicit editors they were coming to us.
Whether you are penning listicles, high-level thought leader pieces, or granular articles in the style of long-form journalism, earned media contributions are proven, long-lived, and essential components in any PR/Marketing toolbox.
by Ken Krause | May 12, 2016 | Blog
When healthcare and health IT organizations send out an RFP, they tend to think in terms of things they want targeted agencies to do. They tend to talk in terms of deliverables, e.g., write and distribute X number of press releases, perform media and analyst relations, secure speaking opportunities, write case studies and so forth.
While all of those capabilities are important, they’re hardly unique. Any halfway decent PR agency should be able to accomplish all of those tasks and more with some level of success on a regular basis. It’s actually one of the things that makes developing content for an agency so challenging.
To find the real differentiator you have to look much deeper. For example, if you look through the Amendola Communications website you can get a pretty good sense of our services. A quick survey will confirm that we can do all the things you need done to make your marketing program a success.
The real value, however, isn’t in what we do, or know how to do. It’s in what we know about healthcare and health IT in terms of its history, its evolution, the impact different decisions and regulations have had and continue to have on the organizations and people who work within it, and the interconnection between your organization’s messages and the bigger picture of the industry.
In other words, it’s the unique ability to present a message within a larger context that helps an organization differentiate itself. That context can only come from a PR agency that is deeply immersed in an industry as complex and nuanced as healthcare and health IT.
Broader perspective
Perhaps one of the greatest values a top PR agency can bring to clients is a broader perspective. Subject matter experts and marketing teams within a healthcare or health IT organization tend to develop tunnel vision about their products and/or services. They know the problem their solution is attempting to solve and how it solves it, and tend to view everything through that lens.
Savvy organizations will also look at competitors to see how they compare. Still, that view is limited to a narrow sliver of the entire healthcare/health IT industry.
Because of the nature of the business, PR agencies have a very different view of the market. Rather than being a mile wide and an inch deep in a subject area, agencies will tend to bring more of an inch deep/mile wide perspective. They will be aware not only of the issues at the center of what the client’s products/services offer, but other areas that impact it ” or it impacts “as well.
Example: population health management
The current buzz around population health management (PHM) helps illustrate the agency perspective. Even a casual walk through the aisles at HIMSS 2016 demonstrated how important PHM has become in the overall healthcare/health IT discussion. Ironic given that just a few years ago PHM was hardly in the mainstream of discussion.
Yet PHM isn’t just one thing. There are many different aspects to it, and carries different meanings to different people within healthcare organizations. When clinicians think of PHM they may think in terms of care gaps and how to reach specific populations, while finance may be more focused on the revenue opportunity (and cost to implement) and the C-suite may see it as a mechanism to transition into value-based care.
Each of these perspectives is valid from a particular point of view. If a health IT vendor gets too deep into the weeds in a specific area, it may make the job of selling its technology to these prospects more difficult.
A knowledgeable healthcare/health IT PR agency will understand the broader implications of the technology because it has had exposure to multiple areas and is already on top of other considerations that aren’t on the client’s radar. Its value, then, will be to make the client organization aware of these additional aspects and use them to tell the client’s story to the media and through content.
Cumulative knowledge
I know this idea certainly applies when I or one of the other writers here is developing content for clients. The typical process for developing a byline article, executive article, white paper, blog post, etc. is to review materials sent by the client, research what’s being said in the market generally, develop questions and set up a call with the client’s subject matter expert. Then we take all that information and create a compelling story.
In the process of writing the story, however, I will often find myself tapping into knowledge gained from working on another Amendola Communications client, past or present. Having already delved at least somewhat into the deep end of a particular topic, such as the crisis around chronic conditions and how best to manage them, I can add information that wasn’t part of the original call or client-supplied information review. This non-competitive, big-picture information delivers additional context that makes the story richer, and thus more valuable to the reader.
Fortunately, I don’t have to rely on just my own knowledge of the industry either. In an agency like Amendola Communications that is focused solely on healthcare and health IT clients, there is a tremendous store of institutional knowledge about a broad range of topics. As opposed to a general agency that may only have one or two people with healthcare knowledge.
A simple email asking if anyone here has a perspective on a particular topic will usually elicit an incredible wealth of information that beats anything you could find with a Google search. Especially since even that context often comes with additional context.
That doesn’t only apply to content, by the way. This same sort of cumulative, institutional knowledge is applied to media relations as well. Not just in sharing contacts, although that is certainly valuable, but also in how to approach a story pitch. One media relations expert’s knowledge of a particular aspect of predictive analytics, or telehealth, or some other hot topic can often guide another to a better way to present the story and demonstrate the reasons a media outlet’s readers or viewers will care about it.
It’s the expertise that counts
When you line their capabilities up side-by-side, most PR agencies will look the same. While who they know in the industry is helpful, it’s the agency’s overall domain knowledge that can really make the difference between a program that performs ok and one that exceeds expectations.
To gain the most value you want one that can connect the dots on their own and apply industry knowledge your organization may not possess internally to round out your story. That’s the hidden value the right healthcare/health IT PR agency can bring. Not just for ours, but in any industry.
Do you agree that domain knowledge in healthcare and health IT is critical? Have you ever worked with an agency that didn’t understand the industry? If so, what was the result? What aspects do you think are most important?
by Stephanie Fraser | Apr 26, 2016 | Blog
Having worked for a professional hospital CIO association for over six years, I’ve moderated and attended my fair share of health IT vendor webinars. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Webinars should not be taken lightly, and should ultimately provide educational insight to attendees and your business. Webinars can help establish you as an industry expert, attract new customers, and add value to your brand.
Here are seven tips to help boost your next webinar and key mistakes to avoid.
- Don’t be a Car Salesman
Nothing will kill a presentation faster than an overly aggressive, unsolicited sales pitch. Leave that to your sales team. If you want to be truly compelling and solidify your company as a problem solver, focus on the key issues that impact your audience and share best practices for overcoming them. Rather than sell every bell and whistle of your product, draw upon examples of how your business is allowing existing clients to reach their goals. Focus on lessons learned.
- Don’t Pull a Bait and Switch
Your webinar title and abstract say you are going to discuss how to build and maintain an effective population health strategy, yet you spend 60 minutes doing a product demo.
- Be Polished and Prepared.
The best presenters are experts in their field, have a strong voice, and are experienced. It’s always good to have a presentation outline in hand with concise bullet points for each slide. Don’t write a script out word for word. Not only will you sound like you’re reading it, you’ll end up relying on it and if you lose your place, you’ll become flustered. Plus, it’s a distraction from the computer screen should any technical issues arise (i.e. you are on the wrong slide, a question is asked).
- Don’t Save Questions for the End
Don’t save the Q&A until the end of your presentation. Strike while the iron is hot and take periodic breaks throughout the webcast for questions. This makes the presentation more interactive and gives you a breather from being just a talking head. Also, not every attendee can stay the full duration and will appreciate the opportunity. Additionally, it helps if you have a team member dedicated to monitoring questions or comments that come in from the audience. This is an effective tactic to ensure questions are addressed or even skipped over. Nothing worse than reading a question a loud and it’s one you can’t answer or completely irrelevant/inappropriate.
- Survey Your Audience
Nearly ever webinar platform has a poll feature. Take advantage of your audience as your own personal focus group. They have already proven interest by registering and showing up, so leverage their time and insight to help your business. Plus it makes the webinar that much more engaging if the audience feels involved, and they will be interested in the feedback of their peers. Just be sure to give attendees sufficient time to weigh-in. Strong questions ought to lead into the next presentation topic and help dictate the amount of time you should spend on that issue.
- Don’t Bedazzle Your Slide Deck
Slides should be visually appealing but keep the animations at bay. They rarely ever work on cue, and slow your presentation way down. Also, don’t use hyperlinks in your slide deck. Any sites you’d like the audience to visit should be posted in the chat window. Keep your slide deck font simple. Avoid elaborate fonts that almost never translate to webinar platforms. Arial is an easy to read, universal font. Try to stick with one color palette and select data and images that reflect your key points.
- You Nailed It, Now Continue the Engagement
When the webinar has ended, continue the engagement by sending attendees a pdf of the slide deck and an archive link to the recording. Be sure to include the speakers contact information and request attendee feedback via a brief survey. Entice your participants with a special offer or prize drawing.
With the above in mind, here are a few other tips to ensure your next webinar is a winner:
- Be cognizant of time zones and holidays when selecting a date and time for your webinar.
- Send an attendee reminder the day of and the day before.
- Log in early. Show up at least 15-20 minutes to ensure the audio and technology is working, Test advancing your slides as well.
- Begin on time. If your registration number is high but the attendee number is low, allow one minute after the hour to begin. It’s unfair to hold up the rest of your attendees.
- Include photos of any and all speakers. It makes the presentation more personalized and allows participants to put a face with the voice coming over their speakers.
- Turn off all devices (and dogs).
by Stephanie Janard | Apr 19, 2016 | Blog
Don’t let its deceptively sterile name fool you the venerable white paper still packs a lot of punch. It remains the ideal medium to educate and make a comprehensive case for a new product or approach, and B2b marketers repeatedly cite it as a top producer of leads on their websites. You can even extract smaller articles and blog posts from it. In short, the white paper is beautifully versatile so much so, there’s room for getting even more mileage out of this marketing and PR favorite with just a few new updates. Here are four to get you started:
Pair your white paper with a Periscope interview of the author. Your white paper is full of new and provocative information so broadcast it! With the Periscope live video streaming app, interviewing the author about some of the white paper’s most intriguing points is a snap.
Include an infographic. Make use of catchy graphics to capture the most interesting information in your white paper. Encourage members of the media to republish your white paper’s infographic in their coverage (and don’t forget to add it to the digital assets library in your online media room).
Create an audio version of your white paper. This will especially appeal to road warriors with perpetually attached earbuds. Add your new narrated white paper to a playlist of other audio pieces, which you can promote as a “Know on the Go” series.
Call it a “guide” instead of a white paper. This just has a warmer and more helpful ring to it, doesn’t it? And it’s an accurate term for a piece that guides prospects to making a wise and informed decision. Of course, no matter what you call a white paper, it needs substance and it needs to be deftly written.
by Tim Boivin | Apr 12, 2016 | Blog
In the Old Testament, Jacob’s Ladder refers to the connection between earth and heaven that Jacob dreams about during his escape from his brother, Esau. Healthcare tech companies dream of a similar ladder the connection between the grounding of their value proposition in the market and the steps up and to the right of their competitors in the Magic Quadrant, MarketScape, Wave or Market Trends Reports.
In last week’s post, we talked about why and when you should do briefings with industry analysts such as Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Frost & Sullivan and Chilmark . Other analyst firms who may benefit from a briefing with your organization throughout the year and not just before HIMSS include Ovum, IHS and Alterum.
This week our focus is on the next steps up the analyst version of Jacob’s Ladder the ethereal briefing itself.
One Step at a Time
There has been an explosion of healthcare technology companies seeking to mine the gold rush started by the Affordable Care Act. And there has been a corresponding growth in the number of analysts and analyst firms covering the healthcare IT market.
Unfortunately, many tech marketers and executives today do not have a clear view of which analyst influencers they should be briefing, nor what story they should be telling, nor how they should tell that story.
Analyst firms add credibility by providing independent, third-party validation to IT buyers in healthcare and several other vertical industries, including financial services, pharma and consumer goods. They also provide deep expert insights on the market to vendors during briefings sometimes only through a paid relationship, but often as part of the discovery process for their industry market reports.
The Gartners, IDCs and Frost & Sullivans of the world have scores of analysts who at first glance you might think should all be interested in your company and technology. However, usually only up to four analysts participate in briefings it is much more likely that only one or two analysts will attend the briefing.
That’s where your PR firm can help. If your PR rep has a strong track record in working with the industry analysts, that person will be able to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff both in terms of which firms will have the greatest impact, and also when it comes to which analyst(s) within those firms are the best target(s), based on their coverage area(s). Firms often have several analysts focused on different points along the HIT horizon for payers, providers, pharma and consumers so you may need to schedule multiple briefings for the different target market segments.
Why is it important to take the first initial steps one at a time? If you think back to HIMSS 16, everyone seemed to be locked in to positioning themselves for population health, patient engagement or care coordination throughout the hall. Those topics cover wide swaths of the HIT landscape. Your PR rep should first drill down within those broad categories to target the most relevant one to four analysts at each firm, and then submit a compelling briefing request through the analyst bookers to secure briefings.
This usually involves creating a brief synopsis explaining your company, its HIT solutions, and your target market, as well as background on the healthcare IT experience of the executives presenting the briefing. Other information that may be requested includes revenues (past and projected), market size and competitors (more on that later).
Getting the briefing, the first steps up the ladder, is actually the easiest part. The steps get a lot more difficult as you begin to shape your vision, market position and messaging for the analyst influencers.
Tighten the Knots
There are several reasons to brief analysts it may be just to introduce them to your company, review your go-to-market strategy, or provide an update (we recommend updating analysts at least once or twice a year). You may also have a new product launch or significant corporate news, such as a merger or acquisition. Or the analyst may be doing research for a report that you want to be included in.
To have the most impact on the analyst and subsequently the tech buyers they are advising in the marketplace, it’s important to tighten the knots on the story that you tell. Usually, analyst briefings last no more than one hour. So the story your team tells has to be compelling, concise and complete all while still leaving plenty of time for you to tap into the analyst team’s market insights as well.
What makes a compelling story? First and foremost are client success stories you can share with the client. Yes, you want to provide a brief history of your company and a brief overview of its most relevant products, but don’t get lost in the weeds for either of those topics. Analysts are looking for proof points, so just like working with the media, the more compelling success stories you have to share, the more weight that will carry with the analysts.
We recommend organizing the presentation in this format:
- Make Introductions
- Encourage Analysts to Ask Questions at Any Time
- State the Desired End Result (“If you get only one thing out of this briefing, it is”)
- Preview a Success Story (should reinforce the one “get” for the briefing)
- Provide Market Overview (targets, size, challenges, competitors)
- Share Company Background (history, size, locations, top executives, number of employees)
- Provide Solution Overview (with demos and product roadmap)
- Share Key Partners (if applicable) and Customers
- Highlight Customer Impact (cost savings, improved outcomes, streamlined processes, success stories)
- Request Analyst Input (questions, feedback, market insights)
- Confirm Next Steps (schedule next update, discuss pending reports, meet at upcoming conference)
Who’s Climbing the Ladder?
Frequently, there is an internal debate that may occur when it comes to who should be included from your team for the briefing. There is no hard and fast rule it really depends on the knowledge level of the person or persons who have the most insights on the target market, your solution and the competition.
However, Amendola usually recommends that no more than three members of your team sit in on a briefing a senior healthcare business executive, someone from product marketing/development, and/or a CTO or VP of technology (to cover the more geeky questions). More is not necessarily better. One really good executive briefer is better than three mediocre briefers.
The call should be hosted by your analyst relations or PR agency rep, who should then become a (mostly) silent partner who starts the call with introductions and finishes the call with a brief recap of the information covered and a summary of the next steps. This person should also serve as the scribe for the call, so the other participants can keep their focus on communicating their key messages to the analysts and probing them for market insights from the analyst’s perspective.
Lighten the Load
One of the biggest mistakes made in analyst presentations is trying to cram 100 pounds of company/solution/market information into a five-pound rucksack as you climb Jacob’s Ladder. You do not repeat, do not want to fall off the ladder because you tried to pack too much into your PowerPoint presentation.
The ideal length for a presentation is 10 to 15 slides no more. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it should leave them hungry for more, so it gives your analyst relations rep or PR firm a reason to follow up with additional information such as white papers, case studies or data sheets (if their questions are more technical in nature).
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be prepared to expand in detail about your slides. While you want to send a clean deck to the analyst firm, use the Notes view for your team to have information they need readily available for questions you anticipate from the analysts.
Second, most analyst firms request that the presentation be sent to them for review at least one day in advance of the briefing. The reason for this is that the analysts want to cut right to the chase in the call. By being able to review your briefing ahead of time, the hour can be spent in a more productive way than just reciting bullet points on a slide that their own two eyes have already seen. That is time better spent on exchanging insights on the market opportunity, competitors in your space, unique differentiators of your solution, or the seaworthiness of your corporate strategy and value proposition.
Also, if you are doing a demo, it is critical that the demo has been rehearsed, tested and aligned with the story you are telling in your presentation. Ideally, the demo is reflecting a real-world situation, walking the analyst through the process of how your solution solved the challenge and benefitted the customer.
Please note: demos should not go on for more than five minutes at the most. Again, this is an opportunity for your rep to set up an additional call down the line for a more extensive demo, if the analyst is interested.
The Next Rungs
Once the briefing is over, your work is not done. It is important to follow up on the action items summarized by your analyst relations or PR agency rep at the end of the call. This provides multiple opportunities to continue on up the next few rungs of the ladder influencing the influencers, so to speak, as they evaluate your climb up and to the right in the market they cover.
The next rungs could be in the form of regularly providing relevant content such as press releases, white papers, case studies or research reports; insights on the market you can share with the analyst; reviewing the relevant section of a market report that includes your company and its solutions; or providing an update in advance of a milestone event, such as a product launch. In order to sustain your relationship with the analysts, it is important to be in touch with them throughout the year, and not just in the month before HIMSS.
