by Ken Krause | Jun 14, 2017 | Blog
So there you are, listening to the PR agencies you’ve brought in to pitch your business. Everything is going swimmingly, and you think you’ve found your top candidate. Then you do it ask the one question that strikes fear into the heart of nearly every PR professional: what sort of PR measurement tools will you use to measure success?
At that point the air gets thick, and suddenly the only sound in what was once a room filled with lively discussion is the steady whirring of the HVAC system in the background.
It’s not that PR people are afraid to be measured on their accomplishments. It’s just that they’ve been down this road enough times to know that’s not really the question that’s being asked. The actual question is more along the lines of “How will you prove your campaign was solely responsible for improving our sales?” That goes double if it’s the VP of Sales who asked the question.
While it would be awesome if you could do it, tying PR to sales isn’t really a fair measure of the effectiveness of the campaign. That’s not just me saying that.
A few weeks ago I attended a webinar led by PR measurement guru Katie Delahaye Paine where she discussed this topic. The analogy she used was a PR campaign to sell cars. If the campaign succeeds in driving 100 people to the showroom but no cars are sold, would you say the campaign failed? Doubtful.
There could be all kinds of reasons the cars weren’t sold. Maybe the showroom never opened. Maybe the salespeople were rude or incompetent. Maybe prospects went for a test drive and discovered the interior noise level was somewhere between “WWII-era Sherman tank” and “jet engine.” Maybe everyone wanted a yellow car and it didn’t come in yellow. You get the idea.
Whatever the reason, it’s not because the PR campaign didn’t do its job. The people came. They just didn’t like what they found once they got there.
The stakes go up with HIT
When you’re talking about health IT (HIT) products or services it gets even more difficult to attribute a sale directly to the PR campaign. First of all, the average HIT offering costs many times more than a car. Would you buy a car based on what you read in a press release, or a byline article, or even a white paper?
Highly unlikely. Once you became aware of the car you’d probably want to research it on the Internet see what professional reviewers say as well as people who already own that vehicle. You’d want to compare it to other models. You’d want to kick the tires (even though that’s completely pointless) and take it for a test drive. Cars cost too much money, and most of us keep them for too long, to just purchase one based on the PR campaign.
So why would anyone purchase an expensive HIT product or service their business depends on, and that they’ll probably have to live with for a few years, based solely on a PR campaign?
The answer, quite frankly, is they wouldn’t. Most things in HIT are considered purchases that require many exposures and steps before the decision is made. The PR campaign will be useful in creating awareness, and a good content program will help walk the prospect through the decision-making process.
But at the end of that cycle, which could take several months or even a year or two, it will be very difficult to suss out exactly how much PR contributed to the sales that do happen. Not to mention virtually impossible to determine how many sales didn’t occur due to some issue that had nothing to do with the quality or effectiveness of the PR campaign.
There is an exception, at least for online sales. Google Analytics does have a pretty sophisticated way of tracking the lifecycle of a sale. Rather than simply relying on the last click, the analytics can associate all the activities of individual users together to provide a history of all their clicks, including their entry point off a PR campaign. That, however, takes some pretty sophisticated work performed by outside specialists. Given that purchasing HIT products and services is a team sport, you have to determine whether it’s worth the time and effort to attribute those sales to PR.
Oh, and as far as ad equivalencies go, don’t bother. Calculating the cost of purchasing the same space versus getting it “free” from PR pretty much went out with parachute pants and giant boom boxes.
What you can measure
Ok, if that doesn’t work for measuring PR, what does?
One good measure is web traffic. The measurement can be overall web traffic, and/or spikes that occur around a PR campaign event such as a press release going out or content appearing in a media outlet or blog.
Measuring spikes in traffic is akin to the so-called “flush test” back in the early days of TV. Executives judged the popularity of Milton Berle’s program by the noticeable drop in water levels when the show went to commercial. Not exactly precise, but it does provide some indication your materials are causing prospects to take a positive action.
Another measure is downloads of your materials. These generally break into two categories the materials that can be freely downloaded, and gated content that requires visitors to give you their name and email address in order to complete the download.
Free downloads are good for gauging general interest among those considered “suspects,” i.e., the casual consumers of your materials. Those willing to go through the requirements to obtain the gated materials are your more serious prospects.
Many organizations like to measure “share of voice” within their markets. They want to see how much of the conversation around a given topic they own versus their competitors.
A simple form of this measurement is volume, as in how many press releases did we put out compared to our competitors? You can also break comparisons down around earned media (interviews, byline articles, product reviews, or anything that requires some effort on the part of the media outlet) and positive-negative-neutral coverage.
The latter generally isn’t a good measure in HIT because the coverage in general will almost always be positive. HIT media outlets are generally looking to inform their audiences about ideas, products, and services they can use, not tear them apart like the political media. In some rare instances, however, positive-negative-neutral can be relevant.
There are others as well. The key is to start by determining what is important to help your organization drive the activities that lead to sales, and then measure the success of those activities. For example, if you know that securing 50 sales at the end of the year requires 2,500 prospects to be deep in the sales funnel (downloading gated content, speaking with salespeople, etc.), and getting 2,500 prospects means you need 15,000 suspects downloading free content out of a total of 100,000 visitors to your website, you have a pretty good idea of how to measure success.
If you do all the other steps but miss the mark on the 50 sales, you’ll also know you either need to adjust your upstream figures, or you have a problem in closing the sale. Either way, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what your next steps should be.
Measure to inform
One of my other favorite things Katie Paine says is to only measure what you’re willing to change. There is no point in measuring the value of wearing pants if you will never not wear pants.
To make PR measurement work, you must understand the actions you’re trying to drive and be willing to change the program if it isn’t driving those actions. Once everyone understands the goals, and PR’s role in achieving them, you’ll know how to measure success.
by Marcia Rhodes | Jun 7, 2017 | Blog
“Story telling is the oldest form of teaching,” Matt Cavallo declared when we met on May 23. I couldn’t agree more. Great story telling has always intrigued me. Maybe that’s why I’m in PR. I have always believed that behind every organization is a zealous individual with an epic story waiting to be shared. It’s usually the CEO or founder, though not always.
Matt is a passionate patient advocate who dedicates his life to the fight against multiple sclerosis. He has been named among the top 10 Social HealthMakers by WCG and his blog was selected as one of Healthline’s top multiple sclerosis picks in 2015. His story of being diagnosed and overcoming the physical and emotional challenges associated with having a chronic disease can be read in his memoir, The Dog Story: A Journey into a New Life with Multiple Sclerosis.
What started as a simple half-hour meet-and-greet with Amendola Communications agency staff turned into a 90-minute conversation. Who has that kind of time, you ask? Well, Matt knew how to keep our attention: he had us laughing one moment and fighting back tears the next. It’s a skill few people have but many aspire to. This ability to connect comes in really handy during media interviews at large trade shows (such as HIMSS) where our PR clients (health IT vendors) get to pitch their product or solution to editors who decide on the spot whether they care enough to write about them or not.
GetWellNetwork founder and CEO Michael O’Neil was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 28. While the medical outcome was excellent, the patient experience was challenging. After four cycles of chemotherapy, he started GetWellNetwork to help hospitals improve performance and outcomes through patient engagement. Michael and his team work tirelessly to ensure the voice of the patient is heard. Today, more than 4.6 million patients use GetWellNetwork technology to engage in their healthcare. Take a minute to watch Michael tell his story in this short video.
Growing up in a family of doctors, ClearDATA CEO Darin Brannan got a firsthand look at the challenges healthcare practitioners face in treating patients using paper and outdated technology. It made him painfully aware of the number of people who die each day as a result of medical errors long before it became national news.
Despite the availability of electronic health records and other technologies that were supposed to solve the problem, reports show that more than 1,000 people still die each day due to medical errors. At the center of this seeming disconnect is a lack of cohesiveness among advanced information technologies. Darin believes that, “Healthcare is less of a science problem, it’s more of an information problem.”
In 2011, he co-founded ClearDATA to apply his cloud computing expertise to healthcare in order to remove the technical obstacles inhibiting patient safety and costing lives. Today, ClearDATA is recognized by organizations such as CB Insights as a leading healthcare information security services company, with $54 million in funding and a customer portfolio that includes some of the largest healthcare providers in the nation.
Dave Bennett, EVP, Orion Health, is passionate about precision medicine. He often tells the story about his son, Carter, who has cystic fibrosis (CF). Here is how he tells it.
Carter’s story
About a decade ago, my oldest son, Carter, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.
Like most kids with CF, Carter had a host of physical problems, like lung infections due to mucous build-up and thrive issues due to pancreas blockage. In eighth grade his lungs needed a thorough cleaning, so he was hospitalized and homebound for three consecutive weeks with a PICC line.
Five years ago, Vertex Pharmaceuticals released a drug designed to address Carter’s specific genetic variation of CF, one that only four percent of patients have.
But when I told Carter’s doctor about it, he said it wouldn’t help Carter because he didn’t have that genetic variation.
Once I pressed the doctor to review 60 pages of Carter’s data, however, the doctor soon reversed his position.
“This is a game changer,” he said.
Now let’s be clear: Carter’s doctor is a great doctor. But he didn’t have the tools to help him analyze that 60 pages of data and connect my son to a promising new drug therapy that went on to stabilize his lung function, end his annual sinus surgeries, eliminate his regular bronchial scopes, made his ED visits a thing of the past, and allowed him to flourish into a six-foot-two-inch, 225-pound captain of his high-school football team. Today, Carter is a thriving college student, our payers don’t have to pay for all the procedures mentioned above anymore, and his mom and I don’t worry about him one bit.
That is the promise of precision medicine exemplified. But in the future, rather than rely on a highly interested advocate like a parent who’s passionate about precision medicine to provide that cognitive support, payers and providers will be able to rely on technology that synthesizes and analyzes the data (e.g., those 60 pages Carter’s doctor couldn’t effortlessly process) and utilize it in the right context at the right time.
“This is my mission,” Dave tells journalists. “I want to help doctors and patients in making decisions about what will help them. To do this work, you really need focus at the mission level, because it’s going to change healthcare for the better and make a difference in people’s lives.”
by Margaret Kelly | May 31, 2017 | Blog
In the good old days of the Internet (we’re talking the 1990s here), clients grappled with the decision to jump on the newest marketing scheme the website. Advertising and PR agencies, as well as marketing directors, had widely divergent opinions about several components that are now taken for granted.
The conversation has gone from, “Do we really need a website?” to “How can we make our website better?”
I was on a marketing team that received a MAME Award for Best Website. (The Major Achievements in Merchandising Excellence golden trophy is to the homebuilding industry what the Oscar is to Hollywood.) My employer strolled into my office and said, “Did I mention you’re going to be the guest speaker on websites at today’s Homebuilder’s Association meeting? We leave in 20 minutes.” After the shock wore off, I must have delivered an intelligent lecture because many of the builders asked me to evaluate their websites.
What surprises me today is that many of the same problems I saw with sites in 2003 still exist. Sure, with WordPress and new design trends, the hot features of today are hero images, video and animation. But in the race to beef up data capture and content marketing, simple, everyday details can easily be overlooked. Vendors and publishers alike can up their game and make it easier for their audience to engage, sign up, download, interact and purchase.
Here are 6 key areas you should evaluate on your website to ensure maximum engagement:
Contact Information
You would think contact information would be a no-brainer. But when I’m wearing my research hat, nothing makes me yell “REALLY?!” faster than wasting time hunting down basic information. Your address and phone number should be easy to find. Your “Contact Us” link should be at the top or bottom of every page. If people can’t reach you when they have questions about your event or product, they will likely move on to the next vendor on their list. Don’t be coy. Give me your 411!
Company Directories
In this digital world, time zones abound and chances are someone out there is looking at your website when you are not open for business. There are pros and cons to both popular methods of people reaching you after hours: “Contact Us” forms and Company Directories.
A contact us form (which is what we have on our own company website) can be programmed one time and simply lives on your website. Visitors can, however, be frustrated if you create a pre-populated and mandatory dropdown-list. What if the reason for contacting you isn’t on that list?
My personal favorite is Company Directories such as the one at HIMSS. It’s easy to find their staff and there’s no question who does what. But, you must keep on top of it and update it often.
Monitoring
So, you’ve got an “info@” email address posted on your website. It’s better than nothing. But who reads your incoming message? More than one person? Do you respond to every inquiry?
Whether it’s someone asking a question or providing feedback, a simple follow-up lets your audience know you’re on the ball.
And please watch the automated replies. It’s great to receive a quick email referencing my trouble ticket number. But it doesn’t make a very good impression to acknowledge you received my email and will respond shortly, and then never get back to me.
Follow up. Every. Single. Time.
Tell me thank you, let me know you’ll consider my suggestion, or forward me to the person who can really help me. Don’t leave me in the dark.
Oh, and remember to redirect the routing of your website mail if you have a change in staff.
Testing
The team members monitoring your web mail inquiries and data capture alike will know the average number of contacts you receive per month. Any sudden drop in those numbers should be a red flag.
Minor updates in website programming, firewalls and email proxy servers can all wreak havoc on your incoming messages. Test your site from time to time. Send yourself an email from the website or fill out any forms to ensure everything is still running as it should.
Social Media Platforms
Are links to your social platforms elusive? Are they current?
I’ve taken over social media duties for many clients and I am dismayed when I discover they have a LinkedIn account but no way to reach it through their website.
If you have multiple channels, make sure website visitors can reach them. By the same token, if you haven’t tweeted since 2013, it might be best to remove the little blue bird until your account is more current.
Yes, websites can be expensive to program. But a laundry list of social media platforms adds an unnecessary degree of difficulty that makes it so much harder for visitors to engage. Our eyes are now trained to look for social graphics and a text list of Twitter and Facebook will be overlooked.
A much better example is to use the icons with which everyone is familiar. No questions here on how I can engage!
But let’s not get carried away. Mashable, gotta love you, but honestly, which Twitter handle do I use when I’m trying to share an article you published?
Social Media Sharing
Publications count on social media to increase readership of their articles. Even vendor websites add sharing buttons to the side of their blogs to encourage readers to engage. What surprises me is how often a pre-programmed post opens in my Twitter profile without basic information such as a Twitter handle.
When you set up your Share buttons, be sure the website plug-in of choice includes your Twitter handle. It’s a common mistake and simple to fix. Also, Twitter doesn’t include links in the character count, but it’s still nice to provide a bit.ly (or whatever service you use) so visitors can RT and comment.
Which is, after all, what engagement is all about. To wit, here are some great examples of engagement done right:
Forbes This site could really improve by adding their Twitter handle and a shortened link, but they get kudos for adding several options of “Tweet This” above the article. Readers will be quick to click that button and get the message out.
Becker’s Hospital Review Share any of their articles on Twitter and the post starts with “Reading @beckershr” followed by the article title and the link.
Health IT Outcomes Push the Tweet Share button and the post is auto-populated with the title of the article, a shortened link, and “via @HITOutcomes.”
Politico’s Morning eHealth Not only does the Share button have all the necessary bits, but the journalists Twitter handles are displayed for even further engagement.
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Not only are these suggestions relatively low-cost fixes, the attention to detail will elevate your website to social success.
What suggestions do you have for making websites more social? Please share them below.
by admin | May 30, 2017 | News
Scottsdale, Ariz. May 30, 2017 Amendola Communications, an award-winning healthcare marketing and public relations agency, announced today that Bridge Therapeutics, Inc., has selected Amendola as its agency of record. Bridge Therapeutics, an innovative development-stage specialty pharmaceutical company, will be pursuing FDA and European Medicines Agency (EMA) approval of a patented (U.S. Patent #8410092) novel drug combination for the treatment of chronic pain in opioid-experienced patients.
Bridge selected Amendola after a rigorous agency review process. Amendola will provide a broad range of public relations and thought leadership services that promote Bridge Therapeutics as a pioneer and innovator in improving the lives of patients living with chronic pain through safer, more effective, and less addictive pain management.
Bridge Therapeutics investigational drug compound BT-205 is a unique combination of two synergistic chronic pain drugs the partial-agonist opioid buprenorphine and the NSAID meloxicam delivered in a state-of-the-art sublingual formulation. BT-205 is being developed to replace dangerous, full-agonist opioid-based drugs with a safer and more effective medication.
“We are excited that Amendola Communications will help us to bring our message about safer approaches to those struggling with chronic pain and addiction to the market,” said Alton Kelley, director of business development for Bridge Therapeutics. “Chronic pain affects more 100 million Americans today, which the Institutes of Medicine report is more than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. As we go through the FDA and EMA approval and commercialization process, we look forward to partnering with Amendola to help us educate the market about the benefits of replacing dangerous opioid-based drugs with a safer and more effective therapy for those struggling with chronic pain and addiction.”
BT-205 has the potential to be a new treatment option for healthcare providers around the world, and to offer patients an alternative chronic pain therapy. When dosed as a combination drug, buprenorphine and meloxicam have stronger pain relief effects, which allows the use of low dosage strengths of both and reduces the potential for negative side-effects.
Amendola Communications will provide targeted strategic public relations services, including media research, media relations, and the generation of top-tier awards and speaking opportunities. The agency will also be responsible for delivering a range of content demonstrating the thought leadership and expertise of Bridge Therapeutics key opinion leaders (KOLs), including bylined articles, poster presentations, press releases and other materials.
“Bridge Therapeutics offers an exciting and innovative approach to addressing the opioid addiction crisis facing our nation today,” said Jodi Amendola, CEO of Amendola Communications. “Addictive chronic pain drugs today kill more Americans than road crashes, and yet the massive chronic pain market in the United States still lacks a non-addictive pain medication. We look forward to promoting Bridge Therapeutics and its key opinion leaders as the company continues to go through its regulatory approval and commercialization process.”
About Amendola Communications
Amendola Communications is an award-winning national public relations, marketing communications, social media and content marketing firm. Named one of the best information technology (IT) PR firms in the nation four times by PRSourceCode, Amendola represents some of the best-known brands and groundbreaking startups in the healthcare and HIT industries. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros delivers strategic guidance and effective solutions to help organizations boost their reputation and drive market share. For more information about the PR industry’s “A Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow Amendola on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Bridge Therapeutics
Bridge Therapeutics, based in Birmingham, Ala., is an innovative development-stage specialty pharmaceutical company pursuing U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) approvals of a patented (U.S. Patent #8410092) drug combination, BT-205, for the treatment of chronic pain in opioid-experienced patients. The investigational drug BT-205 is a unique combination of two synergistic chronic pain drugs the partial-agonist opioid buprenorphine and the NSAID meloxicam delivered in a state-of-the-art sublingual formulation. The dosing and delivery method will be a commercial advantage over the current alternatives. Bridge Therapeutics’ goal is to make the BT-205 compound and other investigational new drug candidates available to millions of patients in which addictive and potentially dangerous full-agonist opioids such as oxycodone and morphine are ineffective and/or unsatisfactory. The company is focused on improving the lives of patients living with chronic pain by developing new approaches to pain management that are safer, more effective, and less addictive. For more information, visit www.bridgetherapeutics.com.
Media Contact: Tara Stultz | 440.225.9595 | tstultz@acmarketingpr.com
by Administrator | May 17, 2017 | News
Interactive patient care leader selects award-winning PR agency to raise awareness in commercial and pediatric hospitals, government healthcare facilities and retail clinics.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (May 17, 2017) Amendola Communications, a nationally recognized public relations, content creation and marketing firm specializing in health care and health information technology (HIT), announced today that it has been selected as the agency of record for Maryland-based GetWellNetwork®, Inc. The partnership began with public relations in late 2016 and expanded earlier this year to include integrated marketing communications to advance greater awareness about the work of GetWellNetwork, the industry’s only true provider of cross-continuum patient engagement solutions.
“Amendola has an award-winning team of public relations and marketing experts and former health IT journalists, all with a wealth of health care technology experience,” said Laura Bramschreiber, vice president of marketing for GetWellNetwork. “Their exclusive focus on health care was an important factor in our decision to partner with them. Amendola was the clear choice given their depth of industry knowledge and connections, as well as their reputation for outstanding client service.”
Bramschreiber continued, “With Amendola’s deep understanding of the market, coupled with their close relationships with key media organizations, the GetWellNetwork story of how we help patients and families take a more active role in their health care journey, is being shared with a wider audience than ever before.”
GetWellNetwork helps leading health care systems create connections with patients in any setting, deliver insights to clinicians in real time, and transform care through an evidence-based model for patient engagement. The company’s open technology integrates with electronic health records and IT applications to extend the value of existing investments and expand the possibilities of care.
“Now that almost every hospital has an electronic health record, it’s about optimizing and improving care delivery. Our team is passionate about driving a deeper understanding in the industry about how GetWellNetwork helps providers use data to create powerful connections to enhance the patient experience and improve health outcomes across the entire care continuum,” said Jodi Amendola, CEO of Amendola Communications. “We look forward to partnering with GetWellNetwork to educate the market about the art of the possible when it comes to delivering truly patient-centered care to every man, woman and child, not just in this country but around the world.”
About GetWellNetwork
GetWellNetwork, Inc. powers patient experience. Our solution, The Patient’s Platform, helps leading health care systems create connections with patients in any setting, deliver insights to clinicians in real time, and transform care through an evidence-based model for patient engagement. Our open technology integrates with electronic health record and IT applications to extend the value of existing investments and expand the possibilities of care. With more than 50 million patient interactions per year, we drive performance improvement, positive outcomes and patient loyalty. Learn more at www.getwellnetwork.com.
About Amendola Communications
Amendola Communications is an award-winning national public relations, marketing communications, social media and content marketing firm. Named one of the best information technology (IT) PR firms in the nation four times by PRSourceCode, Amendola represents some of the best-known brands and groundbreaking startups in the healthcare and HIT industries. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros delivers strategic guidance and effective solutions to help organizations boost their reputation and drive market share. For more information about the PR industry’s “A Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow Amendola on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Media Contact: Marcia Rhodes | mrhodes@acmarketingpr.com| 602.793.1561
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