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.
by Tim Boivin | Apr 5, 2016 | Blog
There is still a misconception that persists among many PR and marketing professionals today that analyst briefings are not worth doing unless their organization has a paid subscription with the analyst firms. We often find that analyst relations is one of the first things that marketers want to cross out of our PR proposals.
Our take Vitare loquitur coniectoribus periculo tuo.
Or, for those former parochial school students like me still struggling with Latin: Avoid opportunities to speak with analysts at your own risk.
Even if your organization does not have a paid relationship with an analyst firm, we strongly believe it is worth your time to do an “earned” briefing similar to the earned opportunities your PR team is proactively seeking from the media outside of the paid/advertorial opportunities that those outlets sales teams are pitching. As long as the privilege of an earned briefing is not abused, analysts are usually open to scheduling calls or even in-person briefings. But make sure you have something important to say, and that you are prepared for tough questions about your company’s direction, target markets, customers, and even its financials.
Analyst recommendations are among the most important influencers for those executives looking to make significant buying decisions about healthcare technology solutions. With all the noise in the marketplace from walking around the HIMSS show floor last month, there are too many companies to count who lay claim as the answer to population health, or personalized medicine, or care coordination it is critically important that your organization is included among vendor recommendations when your prospects check in with analysts.
Yes, you’ll probably have to take a sales call along with the briefing. But the intrinsic, long-lasting value of getting in front of key analysts who decides to make out the lineup for recommendations makes the briefing makes that 30 extra minutes listening to a sales spiel about their services and events well worth the effort. Plus, the media often turns to analysts for expert insights, and while they usually don’t reference specific vendors in their quotes, you do want them to be aware of your positioning so when they are quoted in the media your organization’s vision and positioning are helping to shape the thinking behind their comments.
Which are the key analyst firms you should consider targeting for “earned” briefings? In general, the most well-known firms are still Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Frost & Sullivan and Ovum. But it is just as important to hold briefings with other analyst firms who also have significant influence over buying decisions in the healthcare technology market, including (but not limited to) Chilmark, IHS and Alterum.
Your analyst relations strategy should incorporate regularly scheduled briefings with the relevant analysts at these firms. The first step is to reach out to the analyst firm to request a schedule of reports they plan to publish in the next year. Then, build out a briefing schedule, not only based on those reports, but also based on significant milestones you expect to hit with your corporate positioning and/or roadmap.
Keep in mind that analyst briefings do have a much longer lead time, so it is important to know the process through which briefings are coordinated. For instance, Gartner, IDC and Forrester have central bookers who schedule the briefings. Even if you have spoken by phone or in person with an analyst previously, you or your PR firm will still need to contact the booker or fill out a form on the analyst firm’s website to schedule the briefing. Give yourself 6-8 weeks lead time, so if you have a big launch coming up three months from now, you should be requesting a briefing now.
So you got the briefing booked. Now what? We’ll be covering the Do’s and Don’ts of preparing and holding a briefing in our next blog post, as well as the follow-up that is needed in a timely fashion to make the briefing a successful one.
Check back next week for our next post on prepping for and holding a briefing, as well as how to handle action items that need to be addressed coming out of a briefing. But in the meantime, share your insights in the comments below on:
- Which analyst firms you find have the most impact?
- What works well with analysts based on briefings you have participated in?
- What are some of the common pitfalls of doing analyst briefings?
by Todd Stein | Mar 29, 2016 | Blog
In my 12+ years working with CEOs of healthcare technology startups, I can count on a single hand the number of opening discussions that didn’t include this phrase: “We want to be in the New York Times.”
The expectation among tech entrepreneurs that the nation’s newspaper of record will jump at the chance to write about them is as common as it is unrealistic. This is especially true in healthcare IT, where only a handful of companies sell directly to consumers.
The Times coverage of healthcare IT seems to consist almost entirely of IBM Watson Health (it helps to be one of the world’s great brands) and the IT initiatives of large health insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Conspicuously absent from their coverage is your average startup with a Series A round in the low 8-figures and two or three marquis clients who may or may not be willing to talk to the press.
The odds of such a company getting ink in the New York Times are slightly worse than the odds of being struck by lightning while speeding.
Lightning Strikes
And yet, sometimes, under the right circumstances and with the right preparation lightning does strike.
Case in point. Zipongo is a three-year-old San Francisco-based startup with about 50 employees, $10 million in funding, and one brilliant idea. Founder and CEO Jason Langheier, MD, MPH, helped launch the pediatric obesity clinic at Boston Medical Center. The weight loss program was a great success but Langheier wasn’t satisfied. Millions of overweight American kids could benefit from the program, he knew, and yet it just couldn’t scale within the hospital setting.
Determined to help reverse the nation’s obesity epidemic, Langheier built an application in his “spare” time while earning a medical degree from Duke in three years. And so Zipongo was born. The full story is slightly more complex but Langheier had hit upon an idea whose time had come. Zipongo helps self-insured employers and payers keep their employees and members healthy by making it easy for them to eat healthy.
Read All About It!
I could tell you how they do it but why bother when you can read a much more compelling description of Zipongo’s success with customers like Google and IBM in the Feb. 21, 2016 edition of the New York Times: Wellness App Aims to Improve Workplace Nutrition, by Times staff writer Stephanie Strom.
Wade in! You won’t be the first. Within one day of the story’s appearance in the national edition of the Times, Zipongo had received 40 hot inbound leads and Langheier’s inbox was overflowing with congratulatory notes from folks who’d crawled out of the woodwork to restart old business conversations.
How We Did It
There were at least three primary ingredients involved in Zipongo’s New York Times debut.
- A Lot of Preparation (identify news trends). Our first job in targeting the Times was to prepare a solid news pitch designed specifically to appeal to national mainstream business journalists. The strategy we ultimately developed was the byproduct of an hours long brainstorming session to assess Zipongo’s market appeal and identify supporting news trends. Zipongo had already decided to build a marketing campaign around new nutritional requirements of the Affordable Care Act. An evergreen news topic, the ACA made the perfect news star on which to hitch the Zipongo wagon. But a trend is meaningless to journalists without living examples. We needed an A-list Zipongo customer who would verify that Zipongo fit the trend (in this case, that they helped employers satisfy the new ACA requirement more cost effectively than they otherwise could). Here luck played a role. IBM had just become Zipongo’s newest customer, signing up to provide the app for their tens of thousands of U.S. employees. The agreement with one of the world’s top brands hadn’t been publicized, so it made the perfect fodder for a New York Times pitch.
- Target Beyond the Obvious. When pitching a story about a major technology company like IBM, the obvious route is to pitch Steve Lohr, the Times IBM beat reporter. While we’ve worked with Lohr on numerous occasions, we decided to focus instead on the paper’s food business writer, Stephanie Strom. Strom has a history of covering big brands and nutrition, so the Zipongo story was likely to appeal to her interests. A little research revealed that she would be moderating a panel at a Napa, Calif. food conference where Langheier was scheduled to speak in the coming weeks. We let fly the pitch and – Bingo! Strom agreed to meet Langheier in Napa and hear what he had to say.
- Let Your Client Work Their Magic. This is definitely an ingredient in the Zipongo story but not one for which we can take any credit. The best that a PR agency can hope to accomplish is to put your client in front of a top journalist and let them make the sale. For phone interviews, it’s imperative to prepare novice media representatives with some hefty media training. In-person interviews, on the other hand, live or die with the interviewee’s ability to establish an emotional connection with the interviewer. Here, Langheier more than held up his end. He so wowed Strom that she ended up interviewing not just IBM but Google and several Zipongo end-users as well. The result was better than we could have hoped for a full-fledged company profile that ran to 24 paragraphs.
Admittedly, the stars aligned for this win. Very few small startups have a product as cool as Zipongo’s, and one that aligns with a major national news story like the ACA. Fewer still have an A-list customer like IBM whose brand commands mainstream media attention. But without the right preparation and execution, and lacking a keen understanding of what drives coverage, even Zipongo’s amazing story would have gone untold by the New York Times.
by admin | Feb 26, 2016 | Blog
Our own Matt Schlossberg was quoted in the article below, which originally ran on www.acefitness.org.
Written by Carrie Myers
“Everyone is doing it,” says Jimmy Craig, M.A., video marketing and viral expert and co-founder of MethodLoft, LCC, based in Boston, Mass.
What is Craig referring to? Put simply: video marketing.
“Video isn’t only great at connecting to and converting visitors,” Craig adds, “it can significantly boost your visibility online. Google displays blended search results, too, making it easier for businesses with video to get the coveted spots on the front page.”
Shawne Duperon, Ph.D., six-time EMMY-award winner and founder of Project: Forgive, agrees. “Video is the fastest and easiest way to create relationships in business. People do business with people they trust and like. Video is a medium that builds trust and likeability.”
Not quite convinced video is for you? According to James McQuivey of Forrester Research, the value of a one-minute video is equivalent to 1.8 million words. Here are a few more convincing facts compiled by Adelie Studios and Syndacast:
- 70 percent of marketing professionals report that video converts leads into customers better than any other medium.
- The average Internet user spends 88 percent more time on a website that include videos than on websites that do not contain videos.
- Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.
- Featuring video on landing pages has been shown to increase conversions by 80 percent.
- If a video lasts one minute or less, 59 percent of viewers will watch it all the way to completion.
- Only 24 percent of brands are using online video to market to consumers.
- Using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19 percent and click-through rates by 65 percent and reduces unsubscribe rates by 26 percent.
- Business-to-business and business-to-consumers marketers both say video is among the top three most effective social media marketing tactics.
- 52 percent of marketers believe that video is the content format with the highestreturn on investment.
- By 2017, 74 percent of all Internet traffic is predicted to be video.
- 69 percent of smartphone users say videos are a perfect solution for smartphone viewing, as it offers a quick way for consumers to grasp an overview of a product.
- Three out of four brand marketers and ad agency executives expect original digital programming to become just as important as television programming within the next 3 to 5 years.
PUTTING YOUR FEARS TO REST
I know what you’re thinking. You don’t have the budget to produce videos. Or you can’t stand the way you look on video or the sound of your voice. Or perhaps you feel you’re not enough of an expert to be on video.
Let me put your fears to rest. First, you do not need a Hollywood budget to create videos that will market and promote your business, skills or products. In fact, says Duperon, “your phone is perfect, especially if you’re doing little one-minute video blogs with tips.”
“The bottom line for health and fitness clients are client results,” explains Scott Sobel, president of Media and Communications Strategies, based in Washington, D.C. “You don’t necessarily need to dress up those kinds of videos. As a matter of fact, demonstration and testimonial videos that appear to have been shot by a home user demonstrate honesty and simplicity of method. You see what you get.”
“High-quality equipment is surprisingly affordable today,” adds Craig. “Even smartphones have incredible video cameras now, too. I think that the most overlooked piece of equipment is a reliable audio recorder. If you’re working with little-to-no budget, at least pick up a cheap wired lavalier (lav) microphone, because most on-device audio recording capabilities are severely lacking. You might be surprised how much quality audio will improve a video.”
Don’t have a website to upload video to? Our experts overwhelmingly suggested YouTube as one of the best platforms for video marketing. Matt Schossberg, senior account and content director for Amendola Communications in Scottsdale, Ariz, recommends integrating your YouTube account with your other social media channels to get the biggest bang from your video time and buck.
As an example of this big bang, Duperone says, “You can start a channel on YouTube and repurpose your videos to share on your social media. When I post a video on our Facebook page, it’s getting shared up to 15,000 times. It’s deeply impacting my business.”
According to YouTube’s own statistics:
- YouTube has more than a billion users, which is almost a third of all people on the Internet. Every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos and generate billions of views.
- Each year for the past two years, the number of people watching YouTube each day has increased by 40 percent and the number of hours people spend watching videos on YouTube has increased by 60 percent.
THE NUTS AND BOLTS
As far as lighting and make-up go, keep it as natural as possible, suggests Schlossberg. “Unless you have a budget and expertise, try to use natural lighting. Avoid fluorescent lights or spotlights that shine directly down over your head.”
If you’re a man with a shiny face, Schlossberg recommends splashing some water on your face and drying it off or do a light dusting of translucent powder. “For women, their normal amount of make-up usually works fine.”
Try to make sure there are no shadows on your face, points out Duperon. “If your face is hard to see, it actually has the opposite impact of trust. You literally appear shady and untrustworthy!”
Duperon also suggests keeping your eyes steady and your chin down some. “People have a tendency to raise their chin and it will come across as arrogant,” she says. “People tend not to buy from a person who feels arrogant. It’s actually an act of vulnerability to keep your chin down, similar to how TV news anchors are trained.”
Keep it short and simple. “Keep the topic high level and the message succinct,” recommends Schlossberg.
“Ideally, keep your video under a minute,” Duperon advises. “Research shows more than 50 percent of the audience leaves after 10 seconds. When someone starts watching your 60-second [or shorter] video, they tend to stay with you and the video, because the time investment is so little. Think about how many times you dropped out of a video that says it’s three minutes or longer.”
Lastly, make it personal and speak directly to your audience. “When talking on-camera, talk to one person, just as though you were at [a coffee shop], says Duperon, and use the word you.
If you still feel a little skittish at the idea of going on video, here are a few final words of wisdom from Duperon:
“Dance in the discomfort! For newbies, it takes some getting used to [performing on video]. That’s normal. The more conversational you are and the more authentic, the better. Perfection is overrated. You don’t have to do it perfectly. My motto is that 80 percent is good enough.”
by admin | Feb 26, 2016 | Blog
Attention runners, joggers and power-walkers early morning is a fantastic time to hit the famous Vegas Strip! According to Melissa Farrell of the group Las Vegas Runners, if you get out early enough before HIMSS, you can run along the Strip without worrying about pedestrian or car traffic.
“If you’re staying near the convention center itself, it’s only about a quarter of a mile via Sands Avenue to the Strip,” Farrell says. “You’ll need to be careful on that road and probably run on the sidewalk. From there it is all pedestrian bridges, sidewalks and a few stairs.”
And then, you’ll be able to count the Las Vegas Strip as one of your conquered running destinations!
In addition to heading up Las Vegas Runners, Farrell is a run coach and personal trainer. If you’re interested in getting a group run scheduled from the HIMSS convention, get in touch with Farrell at LasVegasRunners@gmail.com. Or visit www.LasVegasRunners.com for additional info.
