Category: Article

Generate Better Leads through Persona Based Marketing

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Yes, you heard it right. Persona-based marketing can help you generate better and more targeted leads.

Remember those days where traditional marketing was in trend. Let’s take an example of toothpaste. In toothpaste advertisements, marketers used to show a person having teeth problems and the dentist who recommends the usage of particular toothpaste to overcome dental issues. This is nothing but persona-based marketing. Believe it or not, persona-based marketing has always existed in the field of marketing. The only difference is earlier such approach was referred segmentation based marketing. Be it either demographic or psychographic segmentation.

 However, in Persona-based marketing, the complete user profile is considered and not just one segment. Marketers develop personas based on all possible segmentations i.e. behavioural, demographic, and psychographic to map their target customers’ features.

What is persona-based marketing?

The very first question is what exactly persona-based marketing is. Here, the answer is simple. Persona-based marketing is an inbound marketing practice which keeps the buyer persona in the centre rather than the product or service.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your targeted customers. This takes into account their goals, behaviour, demography, interests, pain points and medium of content they consume.

How to create a marketing persona and buyer persona?

Various tools, templates, tutorials, and resources are available online to create personas. However, you need to know the basics of how to create it. The overall process of creating a persona includes the collection of research data, layering and segmentation of data and storytelling to the devised persona.

The steps include:

  1. Survey of online consumer buying trends and their preferences
  2. Interview of customers to understand their buying process
  3. Research on how consumers consume the content or get engaged with online content
  4. Collation of comprehensive demographic information of targeted consumers
  5. Analyse the collected data and confer with the sales team about prospects
  6. Consider current market trends and recent market statistics to finalise the persona
  7. Create a marketing pitch (story) with which your persona/prospect can relate to

Note: In persona-based marketing, the content strategy should be in line with the buyer’s journey. Three major stages of the buyer’s journey encompass:

  • Awareness: Prospect becomes aware of prevalent issues and starts searching for solutions online
  • Consideration: Prospect is in the process of narrowing down the best possible options available
  • Decision: Prospect has reached the final stage of the decision – here, convince them why your offering is the best possible solution for them and persuade them to buy your product/service

Example of buyer persona template

buyer persona template

Why persona-based marketing is a preferred practice?

According to Marketing Sherpa, Persona-based website saw a 210% increase in website traffic, a 97% increase in website generated leads, a 124% increase in website generated sales.

The main advantage of such marketing practice is that here you get a holistic picture of your target customer. Hence, in this case, you are better prepared and able to foresee how your customer might behave or respond to your promotional campaigns.

This insight provides you with an edge over the intense competition. Also, it helps you to beat your competitors with better promotional strategies that are bound to guarantee your success.

You can also have a negative buyer persona. Here, pen down the points that your customers don’t like or don’t want. Accordingly, your marketing pitch should exclude some words.

Example if you are selling CRM software intended for start-ups, your negative buyer persona would perhaps consist of enterprises.

How do personas influence marketing campaigns and lead generation?

The reasons why personas can have a great influence on marketing campaigns and lead generation are enlisted below:

1.  Personalized promotional content

As a marketer, you can take the persona’s perspective into consideration when designing and developing advertisements or promotional content.

Example

Colgate marketers’ broad segments include patients suffering from stained teeth, gum decay, tooth decay, and sensitivity. Hence, all their advertisements are targeted on the solutions to these dental issues.

2. Targeted product descriptions

You can inline your product description with their interests and needs.

Example

The marketing message of Colgate toothpaste is: “1 shade whiter teeth in 1 week’. It indicates that they are targeting the buyer personas that have problems with the shades of teeth.

persona-based-marketing-message-of-Colgate-toothpaste

3. Enhanced Persona-based marketing creativity

Your Persona-based marketing creativity can expand wings since you know who you are going to target and what they are looking for. Based on your market research, analysis and existing trends, you can craft your marketing pitch in a creative way.

Example

This is how Colgate advertises toothpaste for the persons suffering from sensitivity.

how Colgate advertises toothpaste

4. Shortened sales cycle

You can generate better quality leads by utilising personas. Since you know what your personas want, like or don’t like, you can use this information in writing product descriptions. Sending the right message provide you with the excellent opportunity to generate better leads. Such leads can be effortlessly converted into sales.

Example
This is how Colgate explained to its target customers how their teeth can be whitened. It included “power of salt and lemon” as a push.

5. Targeted graphics

Not only targeted content but also you can use targeted graphics when your marketing efforts are buyer persona centric.

example cavity protection toothpaste of Colgate has graphics on its wrapper that attracts kids.

6. Timely modification

You can use forums, public groups, community platforms and social media to learn more about different groups of people. And hence, you can keep updating your buyer personas. However, don’t change it too frequently. Otherwise, you would not be able to judge the parameters that worked well or needed improvements.

SIGNING OFF…!

Persona-based marketing, since focused on buyer persona and buyer journey, help you creating better leads.

Of course, it might take some effort to create a proper persona, but it will always have a huge impact on your ability to generate high-quality leads. This is because you target your marketing efforts to the people who are looking for product/service providers like you.

Always start your marketing efforts only after creating personas. Focus on the factors that align with your ultimate business goals. While preparing your personas, use your own analytical knowledge too. Don’t just rely 100% on scripted survey forms. It is ideal to start with 2-3 persons in the initial phase. The only key to success is to create more effective content and promote your content effectively. This will drastically improve your ability to generate and nurture leads.

Google’s mobile-first Index – Future of Mobile Algorithm

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This post is by guest author, Andrew Gazdecki. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.

We’re in the age of the mobile device. Many of us grab our cell phones the moment we wake up, and it’s likely the last thing we see before we fall asleep. Digital marketers seem fixated on trying to label the ‘Year of Mobile,’ but this is just not enough; it is the Mobile Age.

Not convinced? Well, consider that Google is changing website indexing in favour of a mobile version of web pages over the desktop. And, pretty much anything Google says or does is guaranteed to have an immediate or foreseeable impact on the digital marketing world. You can safely take their word as gospel.

This mobile-first index will have a considerable effect on digital marketing, especially regarding search engine optimization (SEO), web design, and mobile development. Thus, this discussion aims to demystify this colossal shift by Google and look at the immediate steps you can take to prepare for the mobile-first future.

Future of Mobile Algorithm

What Does Mobile-First Index Mean?

Indexing is how search engines, like Google, can retrieve relevant web pages and documents in mere moments after a search query is made. The information gathered and placed in Google’s search index is how they formulate their rankings for the results page. Traditionally, Google used to index the desktop version of a company’s website first, while the mobile-friendly version was treated secondarily. Mobile-first indexing means the opposite is now going to occur.

For some businesses treating their mobile website as an afterthought, consider this your wake up call! That said, it is important to note that the mobile-first index does not mean mobile-only. Google will still index your desktop website, but even searchers on a desktop will ultimately land itself on your mobile page.

Google-Mobile-First-Index

Why Is Google Doing This?

Google is a business and, like any business, they are significantly concerned with their customer experience. Considering that mobile search has now surpassed desktop (mobile search volume is nearly 60% in the US now), it makes sense for Google to adopt a mobile-first approach. They know that the majority of their users are searching on mobile devices, so it’s only logical to display mobile sites first because these are the pages built for smaller screens and mobile navigation and thereby promoting the most consistently positive customer experience.

In a way, the mobile-first index is Google’s way of enforcing the creation of business websites that are great and functional on mobile devices. After all, when a Google searcher clicks on a website link on their mobile device that isn’t friendly to the smaller screen, it reflects poorly on Google’s search engine and their overall customer experience too.

What’s The Impact of Mobile-First Index on My Business?

The impact of the mobile-first index will be felt by all businesses. We’re talking about a fundamental change in how the world’s largest search engine operates. Google has made past changes to how their crawl bots rank pages in the past, just ask any SEO expert. But, these are mere drops in the bucket compared to this transformative change. It is going to have exciting implications in the way businesses develop websites and optimize them for search.

Considering this impending change and the impact it will have, businesses need to start preparing to ensure that the effect their brands feel is a positive one. In other words, you want your business to thrive in the mobile-first indexed world, not suffer.

In terms of SEO rankings, Gary Illyes and Paul Haahr of Google have said that the goal is for the mobile-first change to have minimal impact on current page ranks. However, this is not a guarantee that this goal will be met or that rankings won’t change over time to favour mobile sites.

With your mobile site about to become the version of your website, it stands to reason that there will also be a significant impact on how much traffic your mobile site gets. To accommodate this change, you need to ensure that your mobile site is optimized and has fast load times. This is a crucial consideration when preparing for the mobile-first index because slow sites, especially on mobile really deter users. A new technology called, Progressive Web Apps, is starting to gain popularity because of its mobile-centric features, like fast loading times.

Woman-Searching-On-Mobile

A Quick Note For Websites With No Mobile Version Available

If you have no mobile version of your website, Google will continue to index your desktop site as the primary version. So, don’t feel that you need to rush to make a mobile site immediately to protect your SEO rankings. That said, it’s not a good idea to delay too much or avoid developing a mobile site altogether. Not only are you hurting your customer experience by not offering a site that is friendly to mobile devices, but the mobile-first index could, eventually, affect your SEO rankings by favouring competitors that have a responsive mobile site.

How Do I Start Preparing My Business For Mobile-First Index?

The answer depends on what your business has done thus far in response to an increasingly mobile-centric future. If you have a great mobile website that functions well on small screen devices and have fluid easy navigation and functionalities, then you’ve already done 90% of the preparation. There may just be a few small changes you’ll want to ensure, but nothing major. We’re already seeing a shift among white label app makers moving to a mobile-first approach using web technology.

On the other hand, if your business has neglected its mobile website, you’ve got a lot more work on your plate to prepare for the mobile-first index. Before you start hitting the panic button, there’s some good news that should alleviate any stress or worry you might be having about the change to a mobile-first index.

First, you still have time. Google is taking the rollout of the mobile-first index slowly. When they first made the announcement back in Q4 2016, they estimated that the process would be completed by the end of 2018. More recently, they said they don’t have an exact timeline for when the process will be completed, but they are most concerned with giving webmasters plenty of time to get ready.

Second, it’s Google. They are unmatched when it comes to equipping their users with all of the tools and know-how that they need to use Google products and adapt to changes like the mobile-first index. If you’ve used Google Analytics, Google Search Console or taken a look at any video series of blog content they’ve published, you know what we’re talking about. There are tons of tools and resources available to make this transition as painless as possible.

To start, take a look at Google’s latest on mobile-first indexing and scroll to the bullet point section. These are all tips straight from Google’s mouth on how to prepare for the impending transition.

Raising Your Mobile Site To The Next Level

Even if you’ve made the necessary preparations to get your mobile site ready for this new Google indexing strategy, your work isn’t quite over. A lot of webmasters are going to adopt the Google-recommended, responsive approach to their website development, which ensures that all of the links, content, images, etc. are present on both your mobile and desktop sites. But, that doesn’t guarantee that your mobile site and subsequent mobile experience is user-friendly.

The user experience is a big reason why webmasters have traditionally made lighter mobile versions of their websites. It wasn’t out of laziness or disbelief that mobile is all that it is chalked up to be, but rather a strategic move. Mobile pages need to be easy to navigate and put the most critical information right at the forefront, so mobile users can quickly and efficiently find the information they need on their smaller screen.

Shifting to a mobile-first index

means these light mobile sites will need to be more fully fleshed out with all of the keyword-rich content and other features that make your desktop website so comprehensive and valuable. This is the real challenge facing webmasters thanks to the mobile-first index: creating a mobile site that is robust, full of all of your most valuable content, but still friendly to how mobile users browse pages and consume web content on their devices.

Google is aware of this challenge, and there will be some changes to SEO to account for this. For example, an SEO best practice for desktop websites is to show all of the content and not hide anything with ‘Click to Expand’ tabs or ‘Read More’ links. The reasoning behind this was that Google devalued hidden content and often didn’t index it all. So, any keywords incorporated in that hidden text didn’t contribute to your SEO efforts.

This won’t be the case with the mobile-first future of Google’s search principles. They understand that mobile sites often use hidden content to improve mobile navigation. Otherwise, the user has to scroll down through giant blocks of text to find what they are searching for. As long as you’re hiding content to improve the user experience, Google will index the page as if all content were visible. This is just one of the ways that SEO and web development is going to change as a result of this big shift.

Conclusions

Considering the impact that mobile has had on digital marketing, Google’s mobile-first approach to indexing was just a matter of time. It’s going to greatly affect the way that we design websites and optimize them for search in the mobile space. Unfortunately, it isn’t certain how extensive the effects will be. We likely won’t know more until Google gets closer to finishing their rollout of the mobile-first index. The best thing you can do, as a business owner and webmaster, is to pay close attuned to Google and any news or blogs they publish with regards to a mobile-first index and take advantage of any and all tools they offer to make the transition easier.

How Infusionsoft Can Benefit Your Dental Marketing Automation

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Each and every single product and service needs smart marketing tactic to survive and grow. Dentistry is no exception here. Are you a dentist who is struggling to grow your practice and boost your referrals? Do you want to build trust in your practice? Do you want to help out the patient pool with your treatment recommendations? Do you want to reconnect with the patients who haven’t yet started with your treatments? Have you heard anything about dental marketing automation? Then, this is for you!

A brief about Dental marketing automation

about Dental marketing automation

This is the modern era; gone are the traditional practice days when dentists used to sit in their clinic and treat the patients who accidentally visit them. Max to the max, advertisements were carried out via customary channels like newspapers, televisions or local magazines. Now everything is available online, including the presence of dental clinics. For any query, any doubt, be it a toothache or cleaning of teeth – first of all, a user will run a Google search. And, based on the search results, s/he will dig further.

digital marketing practices

Dentistry has adopted digital marketing practices to quite a significant extent. Here, the marketing of a dental practice is done to educate existing and prospective patients about their services. The digital marketing services are quite common in dentistry. However, apart from website development, SEO and PPC, have you also considered dental marketing automation services? How can they benefit you?

Benefits of dental marketing automation

The right digital marketing strategies will help you get the patients. But, if you want brand awareness, effectiveness in driving the right patients to the practice and securing a positive ROI, you definitely need dental marketing automation services.

Benefits of dental marketing automation

Take a look at the straightforward benefits of dental marketing automation:

1. Convert your website traffic

However good, content-rich and aesthetic your website is – it is not enough to grow your dental practice. Through SEO and PPC, you would be able to drive relevant traffic to your website. But then what next? Is it enough for you? No, driving relevant traffic to your website is just one step towards great ROI on your dental marketing efforts. You, now, need to convert this traffic into your actual customers (here, service consumers i.e. patients).

First of all, you need to analyse who all are coming to your website, what all pages and content they are looking for. What kind of information they access or download from your website. You also need to check whether they are booking any appointments.

All these activities become super easy when you have marketing automation in place. Marketing automation platforms, inThe healthcare sector, open avenues for you to drive your potential patients to take real action.

2. Customised and more targeted responses

You have enough visitors visiting your website. And, based on your analysis, you have also figured out that they are hot leads. It means they can effortlessly be converted into your real patients. But, the real challenge falls now. The only truth you know at this point of time is everyone needs a dentist. How will you tackle each one of them? This is because not everyone would like to avail the same treatment from your dental practice.

For instance, some might want basic treatments like teeth cleaning or teeth whitening. Whereas, some might need advanced treatments like dental implants or dentures.Based on the data and analytics,

you can segment your leads in the following manner:
Segment A: People who need a dentist now for teeth whitening
Segment B: People who need a dentist now for dentures and dental implants
Segment C: People who might need to see a dentist in the future but not now
Segment D: People who are not at all thinking about visiting a dentist

If you fail to attract the hot leads with the right content, your game is over! You need to address their requirements differently. For instance, if your lead is a senior adult looking for dental implants, your message should be appropriate to him/her. And, if your lead is a young girl looking for cosmetic dentistry, your message should be customised and different from the former. How can you use this segmentation to grow your dental practice? Dental marketing automation services are inevitable here. These services help you segment your leads based on their needs and deliver them relevant, right and more targeted messages.

3. No burden on small team size

Unless you have a grand corporate dental setup, you need a helping hand to avoid burdens of your small team size. A single person cannot handle everything, starting right from explaining treatment requirements and procedures, booking appointments to sending them after-treatment patient care advises. Neither can you afford a big team to handle tasks individually.

To avoid this hosted and bustle and make processes more streamlined, you need to have marketing automation in place.

Recommended CRM – InfusionSoft services in your dental practice marketing

By now, you are aware that dental marketing automation services are must for the growth of your dental practice. And, there are many marketing automation tools and CRM available in the market. The immediate question falls here is which one is the best for you and why.

We recommend none other than Infusionsoft services for your dental practice.  Take a quick look at the benefits of employing Infusionsoft services as a dental marketing automation tool to promote your dental practice.

benifites of infusionsoft dental marketing automation

1. AUTOMATION OF SCHEDULING

You can integrate AppointmentCore with Infusionsoft and enable patients to set up their consultation. You can create various time slots depending on your availability and buffer time between two back to back appointments. Your prospects (patients) can select a time slot and practitioner (if any) and book an appointment online. That’s how you can easily create an appointment in InfusionSoft. Hence, when someone schedules with you using AppointmentCore, the appointment will be automatically created in Infusionsoft for you. Using this appointment information, you can create automated processes that will help optimize and grow your dentistry practice.

Important note: Each Infusionsoft user can track their tasks and appointments through Infusionsoft.

 2. Send appointment reminders

appointment reminders dental marketing automation

Once the appointment is booked and entered into the system, the real game starts. Infusionsoft will send appointment reminders to the person who has booked a consultation. It will also send a copy of the same email or text to the staff members so that they are also updated. Just take care that the length of your reminder message is as crisp and clear as possible.

3. Request feedback and reviews

feedback and reviews dental marketing automation

It’s tough for any business to request feedback and reviews. Infusionsoft services ease your pain with almost zero effort. You can build a lead nurturing campaign wherein add a stage that shoots an email for feedback and reviews once the patient avails treatment or visits your clinic. You can redirect them either to your Facebook page or Google page. Remember, word-to-mouth is the best strategy for any practitioner. And these social proofs act as word-of-mouth in dental digital marketing.

4. SEND CONTENT-ORIENTED FOLLOW UP SEQUENTIAL EMAILS

At times, for any dental practitioner, it is challenging to control the drop-out ratio. For instance, your patient visits you to ask for an opinion about teeth whitening treatments. You recommended zoom teeth whitening based on his/her dental health and hygiene.  However, if the patient does not schedule to start, you can send follow up email reminders to start with the treatment, how it is beneficial, and what all can go wrong if the treatment is not done on a timely basis.

This all can be easily managed by updating your patient data in the practice management system. Infusionsoft can monitor overall appointments, treatment stage of the patient and detect the patients who are still idle and haven’t started with any treatments.

5. Ask for referrals: referrals are an essential part of building your dental practice. It can be earned by delivering services that patients are thrilled about. Further, you need to send reminders and offer incentives for those treatments. By making sure this happens every time for every patient, the number of referrals can only increase in your practice.

6. RECONNECT WITH PATIENTS

Along with growth, survival is also important. Similarly, along with treating new patients reconnecting with the old patients is equally important. Infusionsoft services help you out in reaching your old patients who haven’t turned up for a while. You can send them health tips, newsletters, or even festival greetings. Not necessarily they have to get treated from you all the time. But good relationships are a must. They can help you get the referrals and contribute indirectly to the growth of your dental practice. Not to forget – it also helps in upselling and cross-selling.

Closing thoughts..!

Hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Given that Infusionsoft has so much potential to transform online businesses, there’s a lot of benefit to putting your money on the line as an incentive to make it work. If you still have some confusions in your mind or would like to learn more about how you can grow your dental practice using lifecycle marketing and dental marketing automation services, connect with us.

Are you ready to earn better ROI, more and better patients in your clinic? Get started now and schedule your first and FREE Practice Discovery Session. This session will help on both the ends to find out how best we can provide value to your practice and how best you can overcome your hurdles . This FREE session can be carried out over the phone or face to face depending on your preference and location. The session is completely private and confidential.

BOOK NOW

(THIS IS NOT A CALL FOR SALE! THIS SESSION IS COMPLETELY FREE!!)

In this session, we will help you identify how can you boost your ROI by identifying opportunities in the areas of development, automation and growth

Top Web Hosting Solutions In Australia You Need To Know About

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This post is by guest author, Subhan Alam This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.

You’re probably hoping this NOT to be another one of those boring articles that simply spew technical jargon about web hosting solutions in Australia. Rest assured, you have come to the right place.

web hosting solution australia

This article is all about the hosting options available in Australia. Once you are done with reading this, you will have a great idea about the best hosting solution that fits your business model. Let’s dig in, shall we?

Types of Web Hosting Solutions in Australia

There are several kinds of web hosting services available. But, don’t let this overwhelm you

types-web-hosting-solution-in-australia

1. Shared web hosting

Shared hosting service is popular among entrepreneurs and startups with very limited business needs. The reason for this is one – low price. You can subscribe to a shared hosting plan for as less as $3 a month.

In shared web hosting, you share your hosting server with dozens of websites so that all resources (such as CPU usage and RAM) are shared among many users. Think of renting a room with many roommates and you could imagine how shared hosting works. As you may have guessed, sharing your servers with others means that there is a limit on how much of each resource you can use.

If you go beyond your capacity, your hosting provider can suspend your account. So, you need to make sure you monitor your usage. Due to limited resources, shared hosting is usually a choice for businesses with very low technical requirements; not for growing businesses.

2. Reseller Hosting

In a reseller hosting service, you buy the host’s services and use the additional bandwidth and RAM space to host websites on behalf of third-party websites. In reseller hosting plans, you have a control panel through which you can view and control billing, RAM, and storage for all websites you host for others.

This gives you a range of benefits. You not only get to host your own website but hosting on behalf of others helps you earn extra income (a good option to keep steady cash inflow).

Most importantly, you don’t need to have any technical knowledge. All technical issues are handled by your host.

The downside is that reseller hosting plans tend to be more expensive than shared Australian web hosting ones. A typical reseller hosting plan can cost you around between $30 and $40. If you don’t have many clients, it will turn into an unnecessary expense.

3. VPS Hosting

VPS hosting is a lot similar to shared hosting, except that you share a lot fewer resources with others. So, while your servers are shared, you have access to dedicated resources that are not used by anyone else. VPS hosting is you renting a flat with other flatmates. So while you have a shared toilet and dining room, your bedroom, drawers, and cupboards are not.

For this reason, VPS hosting is ideal for combining the benefits of both shared and dedicated hosting.

4. Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is usually the natural progression for businesses that face traffic peaks. Here, you are using a server for yourself only, and all technical resources are for your website’s use alone. To use the flat example, dedicated hosting would be renting a flat all for yourself.

As the word ‘dedicated’ implies, you don’t have to share any technical resources with any other server. For this reason, dedicated hosting is a reliable solution for making full use of hosting resources, which are ideal for maintaining website performance.

The drawback, however, is the high price. There is a huge cost that goes with renting and managing physical hardware entirely for your website server. Dedicated hosting plans can cost around $100 per month. So, unless your website requires a lot of hosting resources, you’re better off with a cheaper hosting plan.

Another problem is that you will need to have in-depth knowledge and expertise with dedicated hosting, mainly server technology. This is because you will have to manage a lot of the technical side of things. A solution for this is to hire a system administrator, and that comes with extra labour costs.

5. Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting, in comparison with the above-mentioned hosting services, runs via a virtualized server (or the ‘cloud’). Cloud hosting works similar to a VPS hosting plan; except that, all data sharing is virtualized. However, this key difference opens up a whole number of benefits.

In this type of hosting, your website is not hosted through a physical hardware device, saving you considerable IT managing and updating costs, and you pay only for the server space used. Secondly, scaling your hosting needs up and down is a lot simpler. This means that when demand is low, you don’t have to continue paying higher infrastructure costs.

But, cloud hosting is not without its fair share of disadvantages. Even with cloud hosting plans, downtime is a major issue. Since cloud hosting is based internet-based, your business becomes dependent on the internet. This means that the smallest outage can put your website to a standstill. So the quality of your internet can make all the difference.

Most important of all, you are responsible for managing all aspects of the cloud hosting from infrastructure to cloud tools. To put simply, you need a lot of cloud hosting expertise to be able to host your websites with the least issues.

6. Cloud Hosting

Managed cloud hosting gives you access to cloud hosting without needing the technical expertise to deploy operating systems, handle security patches, and backup and restore data.

This is especially useful if you lack technical staff or wish to outsource all aspects related to cloud databases, frameworks, and applications to a reliable managed cloud hosting provider. In this hosting service, constant availability and data security features are the most beneficial.

Popular Local Hosting Providers

Whilst there are indeed many Australian web hosting solutions providers, the most effective ones are only a handful. You have the option to host your website on the following hosting providers.

Panthur

Panthur is a Melbourne-based hosting provider offering Economy, Business, and Stealth plans for businesses of all size and needs.

Digital Pacific

Digital Pacific provides hosting solutions for all, from individuals to large corporations. It offers a range of hosting plans: shared, VPS, dedicated, and reseller hosting.

SiteGround

With a wide spectrum of cloud hosting plans, SiteGround is another popular hosting provider in Australia. It not only provides shared, dedicated, reseller, and cloud hosting, but also custom-hosting solutions. Most importantly, it offers managed WordPress hosting service to clients.

Crucial

Crucial provides web, reseller, and managed VPS hosting. It is credited with a number of industry awards for its service offering and is a favoured hosting provider across Australia.

Cloudways

Cloudways specializes in providing a managed cloud hosting platform for bloggers, startups, developers, and eCommerce stores. It offers hosting on several cloud infrastructures and apps to cater to the needs of growing businesses.

Why Cloud-Hosting is The Best

There is a good explanation for why global IT cloud spending is growing at such an alarming rate. According to Forbes, cloud computing spending is expected to reach $162 billion (US dollars) by 2021.

With the evolution in new cloud subscription models and cloud infrastructure servers, such as Linode and AWS, more and more businesses are switching to managed cloud hosting as their preferred hosting solution.

So if you are still unsure about which hosting service is best for your business, managed cloud hosting is what you need. There are many reasons for this.

Firstly, the cost is a big indicator. Regardless of whether you’re a startup or not, choosing a physical hardware server for your hosting will drain your cash. In managed cloud hosting, you are billed according to your usage of resources. This allows you to scale up and down with ease.

Secondly, managed cloud hosting provides consistent availability. In other words, in case you face downtime, a managed cloud hosting provider’s multiple cloud servers can automatically run as a backup.

Furthermore, a managed cloud hosting provider will be more adept at providing services and features suited to your business needs. Take data security, for example. With an unmanaged cloud or dedicated hosting service, you run the risk of compromising your data (unless you can find top data security talent) with data breaches and hacks.

By choosing a managed cloud hosting service, your hosting provider can give you access to dedicated security features and tools, such as IPS and IDS, without you having to manage its hair-pulling details.

Why Choose Cloudways Managed Cloud Hosting Solution?

Cloudways is one of the industry’s leading managed cloud hosting providers dedicated to delivering hassle-free cloud hosting services for you.

It offers a robust Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) platform that allows developers, bloggers, digital agencies, and small businesses to run websites and apps without having to face the complexities that come with server maintenance, cloud security, and other technicalities.

In other words, all technical aspects relating to coding, server setup, or maintenance are handled by Cloudways.

Host Websites on Industry-Leading Cloud Infrastructures

Cloudways enables you to select the cloud infrastructure of your choosing. Among the many cloud infrastructures that Cloudways caters to are Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, DigitalOcean, Kyup, Vultr, and the newly added Linode.

Integration of 10+ Applications

In addition to its multiple cloud infrastructures, Cloudways allows integration of 10+ apps. Some of these include Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, Moodle, Drupal, PHP Stack, and Joomla. This gives you more than enough variety for your website and application integration needs.

Advanced Enterprise-grade Resources for Exceptional Hosting Performance

Cloudways offers a wide spectrum of hosting services and features from security and scalability to dedicated resources, such as SSD-based hosting and Varnish UI. With these, you will have considerable server parameters and resources at your disposal to meet your business and personal needs.

For example, if you are looking to run an Ecommerce store or a professional blog, the dedicated SSD hosting feature gives you lightning-fast load page times to deliver a spectacular website experience for your visitors.

Conclusion

Web hosting solutions in Australia are of many kinds and each is best suited for specific business needs. In spite of this, Cloudways managed cloud hosting is the most cost-effective and efficient hosting service available in the market. Its variety of cloud infrastructures and apps offers plenty of choice and freedom for your business needs.

Advanced SEO: Black Hat-SEO, Local SEO and Competitor Analysis

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This post is by guest author, Sameer Panjwani. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.

Getting your website ranked high on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other popular search engines so you can attract the most traffic is not something that happens by accident. It requires a comprehensive strategy that addresses all the major components of Search Engine Optimization.

In the online world, a lot of websites have addressed basic SEO techniques and ways to optimize your website structure in order to make your web pages more appealing to search engines. Now, in this article, we are going to address some advanced techniques that describe additional things you should – and shouldn’t – be doing.

LOCAL SEO AND COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

Black Hat SEO Strategies

The term “black hat” refers to sneaky, underhanded SEO strategies that attempt to fool or short-circuit the search engine algorithms into ranking your pages higher. While these types of strategies may have worked in the past. Today’s algorithms are smarter and more sophisticated – and designed to identify and penalize websites that use black hat SEO.

The best approach is to avoid black hat SEO strategies altogether. These include such things as keyword stuffing, using hidden text and cloaking, copying and pasting other people’s content onto your pages, and using link schemes that artificially increase the number of links you have leading to your web pages.

In order to stay away from these black hat SEO techniques, you should know what they are:

  • Keyword stuffing is when you include an excessive amount of keywords within your content in order to artificially boost your keyword saturation. Not only are algorithms designed to identify this now, but it also will make your content effectively unreadable, turning away-page visitors.
  • Using too many H1 headings used to help get pages ranked higher, but now search engines will penalize pages with more than one H1 heading.
  • Copying and pasting content from another page is not only unethical. But it also could be a violation of copyright laws. If you aren’t able to create original content for your web pages on your own. Consider hiring a professional freelancer to do it for you.
  • Link schemes are programs that artificially build backlinks in order to make it seem as if your content is more influential than it actually is. Search engines now actually put more value in the number of social approval signals you have. Such as Facebook Likes and how often your link has been re-posted on Twitter – than the number of backlinks your content gets.

When it comes to black hat SEO strategies, the best approach is to avoid them altogether and instead focus on innovative approaches to improve your SEO.

Local Search Engine Optimization

The Internet is global, but your customer base is often very, very local. To rank higher on Google and other search engines, include keywords that include geo-specific information about your website. For example, the keywords “auto body repair” will likely bring in millions of links on Google. But “Akron auto body repair” will bring in a much more specific SERP listing that will be more valuable to users looking for that specific type of service in that specific geographic location.

You also can localize your SEO by including local information on each page of your websites, such as your street address, phone number, and business name.

The Google Search Console also allows you to specify the country or region you want to target. If you are already a Google webmaster for our site, the steps are simple:

  1. Click on Tools
  2. Set your Geographic Target
  3. Input the geographic location for your website
  4. Select the country or region you want Google to target

It’s important to note that Google restricts this feature to sites with a given country code top-level domain.

You also can use Schema Markup to aid Google in identifying places listed on your web pages. For example, if you include reviews or other business information, structured markup can help connect your pages with these places online.

Helpful Hint:

If yours is a physical business with multiple locations, you probably would want to create unique pages for each location. Making sure to include different content on each page, including local contact information.

Schema Markup is the common criteria all the major search engines have agreed to support rich snippets. Microdata is based on HTML tags that assign brief, descriptive names to items and properties within your pages. To learn more, check out this helpful article or visit Schema.org. Our you can use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool provided by Google to check the structured data markup on your web pages.

Competitive Analysis

The key to running a successful business is attracting more visitors to your web page than your competitors’ sites. Competitive analysis is the process of keeping tabs on what your competitors are doing right – and doing wrong – and stealing their best ideas while learning from their mistakes.

One way to do this is by running a backlink analysis of your competitors’ site. And then comparing the report with yours. The biggest indicator of this is page ranking. If they are ranked higher than you on Google or other popular search engines. You need to change that by following the SEO strategies outlined in this series of articles!

Another way to “keep score” is to find out how many visitors your competitors’ sites get compared to yours. This can be done using data provided by Compete and Alexa, two popular online website measurement tools.

Finally, it’s important to track what your competitors are doing off-page. Set a Google Alert to create competitive brand name monitoring so you can get notified every time your direct competitors get mentioned online.

Subscribe to their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts so you can analyze their social media strategies such as the best time to post on social media platforms, the type of content to post etc. and compare them against your own. Remember, Google now gives additional weight – and ranking – to websites with a higher number of social approval signals. Such as Facebook Likes, now often their links are re-posted on Twitter and others.

Your competitors are always improving. So it’s going to be up to you to continually seek new and effective ways to improve not only your SEO but the way you promote your business online, through social media and other platforms.

Dental Digital Marketing Checklist – Ensure all is perfect!

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Weeks back, we had committed to publishing a digital marketing checklist for dentists. And here, we fulfil our promise. In one of our previous blogs, we have shed a light on the most anticipated digital marketing trends in the healthcare industry to watch for in 2018. This blog will open your eyes in doing dental digital marketing in a correct and organised way.

Dentistry is a dynamic world. More and more dentists are joining the ranks of corporate dentistry. According to research, the number of applicants to dental school has impacted dental school enrollment appreciably for the past half-century.

In all, dentists are growing in huge numbers across the globe. Naturally, when there are more numbers of service providers, the intensity of competition would be high.

Are you a private practice owner of a dental clinic who is tired of competing with corporate dentistry?

Read on how to survive in this intense dental digital marketing competition and beat your competitors. And, don’t forget to access your dental digital marketing checklist!

The tactic of carrying out digital marketing activities is almost similar to any business. The only important thing to note is the buyer persona of the business in the question. Here, we are specifically talking about dentistry.  What do all dentists need to survive? Patients – right? To get a pool of patients, practitioners need to have a good online presence and reputation in the market.

All these aspects are well-taken care by a correct approach towards digital marketing. The more precisely we can say dental digital marketing.

Elements of dental Digital Marketing

Elements of dental digital marketing

The dentists who are little aware of online marketing would be well versed with the basic terminologies like online presence, website traffic, search engine optimisation, and social media marketing. Anyways, there is no need to go to the deepest level. This knowledge is enough to strengthen your marketing efforts.

We will quickly give you a brief of what exactly dental digital marketing requires and how is it being carried out.

1. Website designing and development

To build your online presence is a must. This can be done better with the help of your own customised website. If you own your dental clinic website, you will be in a good position to reflect your philosophy on patient care and what experience your patients can expect from your dental clinic.

2. Search engine optimization

Once you have your website, the real fun starts. Did you know: 70% of patients search for new dentists online?

Promotion of your website, both organically and inorganically, is must in the initial phase. Later on, you can rely more on organic marketing and lessen your paid marketing budgets. Optimise your website, it’s content and images to make search engine friendly. The set of such activities is called search engine optimization.

3. Social media marketing

One of the most effective ways to market dental services is social media marketing. Almost all people have one or more social profiles and they stay active on it. Take the most possible advantage of this fact. Establish your social media presence and interact with your targeted audience. Do not sell anything directly on social media. Rather use your social networks to respond to patients’ queries, share dental hygiene tips, respond to inquiries and expand your network.

4. Content marketing

Content is the central part of any sort of dental digital marketing activities. Create a content with which your targeted patients can connect with. Share your content in your social networks.

QL Tech Tip: good and targeted content acts as an efficient salesperson.

A dentist in his network can be proved as an expert on orthodontics if he wants to be. This can be done by writing enough blogs and articles on ‘orthodontics’ and sharing it in front of the right audience.

5. Paid marketing

Paid marketing helps – period! We did not mean that you should empty your pockets in the hunt of patients. But, logically done paid marketing can boost your website traffic, generate leads and increase conversions. Overall, it results in a great ROI. Be it Facebook marketing or Google Adwords, you can spread your presence quickly and offer your services to the patients who are actively looking for it.

High performing keywords also help in correcting your organic promotions.

Read more here: How a successful PPC campaign can skyrocket conversions for dentists?

6. Online reputation management

Last but not the least and very important thing is – online reputation management (ORM). ORM is the practice of attempting to shape public perception of a person or organization by influencing online information about that person or the entity. It works towards bridging the gap between how a dental clinic sees itself and how others see it. ORM monitors the reputation on the internet by handling and addressing content that can have a potential negative impact on the reputation or the status of a particular person, brand, or an organization.

Here comes treasure for you…!

A lot of talk on what to do in dental digital marketing is over. Let’s help you guide on how to do it. Access this dental digital marketing checklist and ensure that all activities are going in the right direction with the right efforts.

Once you read your checklist, do not forget to share it. Also, drop your takeaways in the comments box. We’d love to hear from you.

Note: Since the checklist content is thorough, we have created a Google file for your easy access.

Social Media Marketing tips, tricks and tactics

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Social media marketing is the course of gaining website traffic or catching the attention of your target audience through social media sites. Social media is a powerful and influential place. If you follow the right tactics, you can not only earn engagement and increase followers but also generate leads and grow your revenue.

QL Tech Tip: If you devise your social media marketing strategy by keeping the social media trends in centric, you will surely come up with a winning strategy.

Social media marketing provides strong support to your advanced SEO efforts in increasing website traffic and boosting brand awareness.

In this blog, we will take you through the most anticipated FIVE social media marketing trends for the year 2018. In addition, this blog also comprehensively covers social media marketing tips and tricks on how to succeed in your digital marketing campaigns.

5 social media marketing Tips and tricks

Social Media Marketing Trends and Tips

Peep into the upcoming trends that will be your secret sauce to social media marketing success

1. More preference to personalization

Social media is a crowded place. A lot many users post their content on lot many social media advertising platforms. It is, hence, a challenge for marketers to get noticed prominently. Here, personalization acts as a saviour.

Personalization helps to reach the correct audience and track their buying behaviour based on their search preferences. You can use social media marketing tools which allow you to incorporate personalized targeting feature. Post your content on social media in front of your high potential customers.

2. More attention to visual marketing

By 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 79% of all consumer Internet traffic

SmallBiz Trends

Approximately 80% of the consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. Video content is on its peak and it is not going anywhere soon. It emphasizes the need and upcoming trend of visual marketing.

On the other hand, live streaming versions are on spree. Be it Twitter Periscope, Facebook Live, Instagram Story, video sharing features of DubSmash and others, live feeds are getting way popular. Such videos can engage with your audience very well.

All you need here is powerful graphics which can fascinate your viewers.

Read here: Magic of Visual Marketing in Beating Social Media Competition

3. More expansion of native Content Promotion

If you rely on a traditional way of social media advertising, your brand will hardly survive in the highly intensified competition. Audience nowadays is more intelligent and aware of what they want, and probably from where.

Based on research, native ads are expected to reach more than $21 billion by 2018.

Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. Along with the growing importance of native ads, native content will also grow.

Brands want their native advertising to look as similar as possible to the third-party site’s content.

Content Marketing Institute

4. More admiration of brand sponsorship by marketers

Brands are looking for various alternate means to reach their target markets. This is because traditional advertisements have reached their saturation level. This will shift the focus of marketers towards brand sponsorship, also known as advocate marketing.

QL Tech Tip: Popular brand advocacy tools are LinkedIn elevate, Klout, Ambassador, and Influitive.Most B2B marketers (89%) agree that customer testimonials are among the most effective content marketing tactics, and 88% cite case studies as well.
www.marketingprofs.com

Brands will make efforts to activate micro-influencers such as employees, customers, partners, and others.

5. More focus on Marketing Automation

If you are in digital marketing, to sustain the intense competition, marketing automation is a must for you. The future of social media marketing in 2018 is hyper-focused on the context. To create these contextual experiences for users, social media marketers must realize the need for automation tools, especially marketing automation tools.

Read here: Know the best marketing automation tools for your business

According to Marketo, 91% of users believe that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels.

Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. Nucleus Research

Marketing automation will see an upward trend in the year 2018. Automation tools can help you in lead management, conversions, retention and feedback as well as provide insights for evaluation and future planning. The main purpose of using automation tools is to automate tasks that are monotonous and don’t require personal attention.

You need to formulate your social media marketing strategy by keeping these anticipated trends in the notice. If you are wondering how to do social media marketing, we have come up with social media tips and tricks.

11 Social Media marketing Tips and tactics

Adhere to these top 10 social media marketing tips and tricks and maximize your ROI on social media

1. Formulate social media marketing policy

For being an active and influential social media marketer, you need to formulate your social media marketing policy.

QL Tech Tip: Create a plan strategy document (PSD) for all possible media, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus, and others.

Your PSD should precisely sketch the way of how to accomplish your goals. You can incorporate your content plan, scheduling of posts, target audience, etc under this document.  Further, your policy should also include action points for the plan. All your efforts should be in line with your buyer persona.

Read here: Top 5 killer reasons why you need to create buyer persona

2. Follow the action plan and monitor your activities

Only PSD will not help to boost your social media marketing, all you need is discipline and consistency. Whether you use one social media channel or multiple, you should use a social media management system. This will help you schedule your posts, know your analytics, and manage your repetitive tasks in a timely manner.

Once you know your best time to post, you can then use a tool like Buffer, Post Planner or Sprout Social – all these are excellent social media management tools. Usage of these tools can help you plan or schedule your posts at specific intervals. Such tools also help in spreading scheduled posts out to publish throughout the day and engagement time. Moreover, its analytics also provide a social media audit report. This report provides you with enough insights on the likes, shares, impression and engagement of your posts.

Read here: All you need to know about the importance of Social Media Audit

3. Repost your posts

Most of the digital marketers make a mistake here. Once they share their blog or any business update, they keep waiting for someone to “like”, “comment”, “share”, or “retweet”.

Let’s be practical and accept that every person in the industry would be following a lot many people. Even after a refreshing feed for every five minutes, there are chances that your content gets lost and may not appear in the top of the feed. That’s why repost your posts. Schedule your posts wisely.QL Tech Tip: You can try out varied versions of your titles and images/ GIFs for the same blog post. It really helps!

4. Try A/B Testing for Ads

Among all social media networks, Facebook advertisements are the most popular. And this popularity is going to remain as is in the year 2018 too.

Now the question is how to ensure that your Facebook campaigns are up to the mark? Well, Facebook Ads A/B testing is the most effective way to successful campaigns. Its targeting options are robust.

Facebook will display your ad to the right audience only. A perfect ad can magically boost your ROI and radically increase the reach of your posts. To increase the likelihoods of your social media success, analyze the performance of your ads.

Read here: Top 6 Facebook Advertising Strategies for Instant Conversions

5. Concentrate on your social media content

Pay special attention to your social media content. It is the online face of your brand. Keep it authentic, non-plagiarized, relevant and updated. Your images, links, and titles should be fresh, engaging, and intriguing for your readers.

A tool we found to be very nifty when it comes to posting evergreen content is Tailwind.

Use visual content as much as possible. Approximately 64% of the consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. As mentioned above, video content is at its peak and it is not going anywhere soon.

6. User-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is the most trusted content by the users. It has more weight age than brand content.  Your social media marketing activities should encourage your fans and followers to create such content.

The best example of UGC campaign was embarked by Coca-Cola on Instagram. They had used hashtag #ShareACoke and it has generated tons of UGC. All you need to do is create a buzz for your brand through various quizzes, contests, chats, puzzles or other tactics. Leverage the power of hashtags. Create unique hashtag for your brand.

UGC campaigns work best on Instagram.

Read here: Instagram – A Booming Social Media Platform in Digital Marketing

7. Make your content bank

Don’t just create content when it is time to post. Instead, prepare your social media content bank. Based on the recent trends and updates, you can make quality amendments in your content bank.QL Tech Tip: Create your content bank now, if you haven’t yet.

It should include blogs, articles, info graphs, tutorials, webinars, videos, eBooks, cheat sheets, templates, reports, case studies and others.

8. Make the most use of visual content

Did you know 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual? It taps into the intuitive psyche of your audience and motivates them to discover more about your brand.

Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than the text.

3M Corporation

Visual content has the ability to present complex information in a quick and clear manner. Images, info graphs, videos, memes, presentations, and screenshots are some of the types of visual content.  Visual content is easy to understand and handy to share. Your visual content will get more shares as compared to your textual content.

Read here: Top 6 Types of visuals to boost your visual content marketing

9. Explore the benefits of contests and promotions

People on social media love to interact. They enjoy participating in quizzes, contests and polls. Social media is a beautiful place for engagement. Try to get the attention by vote contest, photo contest, caption contest, and others to promote your brand.

If you promote any special offer, include discounts for your audience. It is an exceptional way to offer value through your social media channels and award people an incentive to keep on following you.

10. Keep an eye on your competitors

Sarcastic but true, competitors are real motivators. You should keep an eye on what and how they are doing on social media platforms. Notice their way of engagement, what they post, when they post, what is unique about them, etc. This will help you frame your marketing strategy in a much better and healthier way.

QL Tech Tip: Following your competitors does not mean that copy what they are doing. But it means to understand what is right and follow the best industry practices.

11. Stay updated with the industry trends

Last but not least; stay updated with what’s going on in the industry you serve. Industry trends can significantly impact your business and marketing strategy. If you identify the market trends early enough then it is easier to plan for changes. You can grow your business successfully. The best way is to subscribe to social media blogs to keep you aware of recent news, amendments, and advancements.

Conclusion

Social media is gaining huge traction for digital marketing. All you need to know about powerful and effective social media marketing is wrapped up in this blog, including trends, tips, tricks and strategies for social media agencies. Keep the latest and upcoming social media trends into notice and accordingly devise your social media marketing strategy.

Get started now with social media marketing that results in success to reach and engage your target market.

Automation in the healthcare industry – Massive Benefits

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Weeks back, we shed light on the growing importance of digital marketing in healthcare industry. No matter whether you run a corporate day surgery or a clinic, digital marketing and automation are becoming must-have elements for practitioners and medical service providers.

Let’s understand the need for automation in the healthcare industry

If you are from the healthcare industry, probably you would have started taking help of automation.  And, if you are little hesitant about why you need automation in the healthcare industry, read through this article. There are numerous benefits of using automation in the healthcare industry.

A small exercise: Which scenario intrigues you more?

Scenario A:

John runs a dental clinic. He has employed 4 full-time nurse navigators. On average, they spend their 12 hours a week in attending phone calls, booking appointments, and maintaining excels of patient data.

Further, both in-house and outdoor patients are highly dependent on nurses for their treatments and related care. Obviously, nurse navigators have dual responsibilities of taking patient care and maintaining data. And hence, John can get very little quantified feedback data from their reporting. Since there is not much of actionable data to analyse, there are no corrective systems in place.

In spite of sufficient staff, John is not professionally satisfied. The reasons were quite a few. Nurse navigators are spending more than required time on repetitive and monotonous tasks.  Also, he is unable to provide a personalised touch to his regular patients who lose their track during on-going treatments.

Scenario B:

John is advised to take help of automation to ease his pain. After employing business process automation in his dental clinic, he could lessen his fixed salary costs. Now, he has employed 3 full time and 1 part-time nurse navigators.

Further, when his patients go off track in taking their care from home, through self-service tools, he provides them with automated alerts. These alerts help them bring back on track.

The systems which he employed are user-friendly and provide him with immense ease in knowing real-time patient data.  With the help of actionable feedback, he is able to gauge what concerns can be addressed that results in an overall increase in his ROI.

What is your take on these two scenarios? For sure, you will like to have an environment similar to Scenario B for your clinic/practice. The reason behind the differences in the environment is nothing else but “automation.”

It is the right time for you to realise the need of automation and get ready to tackle with new processes. Take a quick glance at some of the most prominent benefits of automation in the healthcare industry.

Benefits of automation in the healthcare industry

Increase in labour efficiency

Whether you run a day surgery or a small clinic, you need to carry out lots of stuff on a daily basis. A large chunk of routine activities is monotonous. Moreover, activities like processing insurance payments, transferring lab reports to the appropriate clinician, scheduling patients’ appointments, and compiling medical records and charts are routine admin tasks.

If you apply automation for these tasks, imagine how easy it would be for you. In addition, the entire labour work can be done in a few clicks and in much better-synchronised manner.

There is a common fear among practitioners and day surgery owners. They fear that implementing automation might hurt employments. But, this is not the case. Reduction in labour costs does not directly imply lay-offs in mass. In fact, medical centres, clinics, and day surgeries will still require people to get trained on how to automate monotonous tasks that result in efficiency and higher productivity.

Reduction in waste

Automation can efficiently boost the connection between nurses and patients. Nurses don’t need to spend their much of time in admin activities. Hence, nurses can better invest this saved time inpatient care.

On the other hand, usage of various papers, worksheets, registers, and others result in immense workload leading to a lot of waste. Automation can save all this is quite an effectual manner. A Texas hospital study found that greater automation in the areas of medical records, order entry, and decision support appeared to result in a reduction in deaths, complications and cost.

Increased certainty of results

Automation not only eases your admin activities, but it also helps patients to remain on track throughout their treatment tenure. With the help of automation in the healthcare industry, you can send your patients regular reminders of their next due treatment of consultation. You can also send them health tips, precautionary measures, or any other dos and don’ts related to their ongoing treatments.

On the other hand, since patients follow a standardised care path as directed by your automation services, most likely they will stay on track. Even if they get deviated, there are high chances of them coming back to track due to regular reminders. And hence, treatment outcomes will be quite close to your predictions.

Insights based on data rather than presumptions

Automation in the healthcare industry can make your lives much easier since you can get data-driven insights. Through properly integrated systems, you can get real-time data and continuous feedback. These two elements play a major role in performance enhancement and process optimisation.

Click to read more on: What is Marketing Automation?

Closing thoughts

The above listed expected benefits are just a glimpse of the overall picture. Once you get started with automation in the healthcare industry, you will be able to enjoy the beauty of automation services.

Digital marketing in the healthcare industry

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Every company needs a digital plan, but some sectors are more suited than others for digital marketing. Lanre Onibalusi

You’d be surprised to know that these industries are nailing themselves when it comes to digital marketing.

  • Legal (law firms)
  • Healthcare
  • Automotive
  • Entertainment
  • Food and beverages

Let us specifically talk about digital marketing in the healthcare industry.

Most of us have grown up seeing offline healthcare marketing through the means of banners in public places, radio ads and testimonials in newspapers, promotion of medical camps on television, and organised special health camp by hospitals and clinics.

However, the era has changed. There is a major revolution in terms of online presence and digital marketing in the healthcare industry.

Why digital marketing in the healthcare industry?

“Searching for health information is the 3rd most popular online activity”

All those info that is searched online is possible to market online. Nowadays, people surf the internet not only to find businesses or service providers but also to look for solutions to their problems online. Digital marketing includes mobile marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, and more.

Since digital marketing is inexpensive as well as an effective way of marketing when compared to traditional methods, the healthcare industry cannot miss out on digital marketing.

digital marketing healthcare industry

Digital marketing trends in the healthcare industry

Both ‘who’ and ‘how’ of marketing strategies in the healthcare sector are getting affected. Hence, there has been a revolution in the role of physicians and practitioners as decision-makers.

These are the top-most digital marketing trends for the year 2018. Every healthcare marketer should evaluate these trends while determining the digital marketing strategy.

1) Transforming roles of self-employed doctors as paid employees

Decades back, certified healthcare professionals were proud to hang their signboard outside their newly opened clinic. However, over a period of time, this profession has also seen chunks of progression. Now, doctors are becoming employees. Many physicians and practitioners prefer to work as an employed doctor at corporate hospitals. They get handsome salaries rather than risking their own finance by opening own small private clinic. The number of physician practices owned by hospitals and health systems jumped 86% from 2012 to 2015, according to a survey conducted by Avalere Health for the Physicians Advocacy Institute (PAI).

On the other hand, it is also a win-win situation for corporate hospitals who have invested a huge amount of finance in infrastructure. When hospitals successfully gather the right mix of salaried front-line doctors and specialists under one roof, they can offer cost-efficient and coordinated patient care.

When doctors become employees, they lose their decision-making ability to selling medical services and products. Hence, such corporate hospitals need to look for ways to market their services online. In addition, these hospitals race to employ good physicians. This is also one of the most important factors affecting the need for online presence.

2) Consumers (here, patients) are now ardent researchers

How many of you have researched online the drug content prescribed by your physician? Almost all of us do this. And, it’s nothing wrong in it.

84% of patients use both offline and online sources for hospital research and 44% of patients book an appointment who research hospitals site on a mobile device.

Rizwan Ahmed

It is not that patients don’t trust the doctors. But, they do not blindly start undergoing medication until they get convinced. They prefer doing their own homework on the research of their symptoms, prescribed medication, available treatments, available hospitals, and the tentative tenure of getting cured of it.

Consumers’ awareness towards the healthcare sector also boosts the digital marketing needs for service providers like clinics and hospitals.

3) Targeted marketing of healthcare industry

As said above, it is all about ‘who’ and ‘how’; whom to market and how to market rather than what to market. There are various audiences for the entire healthcare industry. Target market could be segmented as patients, practitioners, clinics, hospitals and similar others. Once the ‘who’ is identified, it comes ‘how’ to do digital marketing. Numerous Healthcare consumers now rely on the internet for health-related information. Similarly, many physicians research on smartphones for medical studies and the latest updates on the technologies.

4) The growing importance of digital channels over traditional marketing

Almost each and every industry sector has joined hands with digital marketing to top on SERPs. Healthcare industry is also not an exception here. According to MM&M study, the greatest growth for the biotech, medical, diagnostics, and pharmaceutical device marketing budgets is taking place in digital sales material, mobile apps, and social media.

Consumer marketing tactics are greatly transforming to digital ads, mobile apps, and social media. Hence, this shift towards digital marketing in the healthcare industry is no wonder.

At last!!!

The global healthcare industry is growing at a promising growth rate where digital content plays a significant role. Healthcare industry is rapidly adopting digital marketing strategies to exercise various tools and make a huge impact, both globally and locally. A well-organized, better targeted, and effective strategy of digital marketing in the healthcare industry can easily drive lots of organic traffic. Keep reading blogs; soon we are going to publish a digital marketing checklist for dentists. This checklist will help dental digital marketers to audit their current internet marketing efforts and explore new avenues of their online marketing strategy.

5 SEO mistakes to avoid for e-commerce sites

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The growing usage of smartphones has transformed businesses and lives drastically. Be it hiring a cab, buying clothes, ordering food or availing services online; everything is just a click away at really cheap rates. And, the e-commerce market is expected to grow at a fast pace in the coming years. According to AT Kearney 2016 report, the e-commerce market in GCC countries is expected to grow to US$20 billion by 2020 from $5.3 billion in 2015.

e-commerce sites come across various SEO challenges that obstruct their efficiency. There is a need for business owners, marketing managers, and SEO experts to know these problems; and plan accordingly for their solution. I have jotted down 5 on-site SEO problems which hold back E-commerce sites from delivering to their optimum.

on-site seo

5 SEO problems that hold back e-commerce sites

1. Product description not clear:

Usually, e-commerce sites have a considerable number of products. The quality of a product description can either make or break a sale. It is common for product descriptions to be really short, manufacturer based and automated. With short and automated descriptions, the search engine has limited information.

It is seen that sites with a detailed description of products perform better in search results on all popular search engines. e-commerce website owners should try to include a piece of detailed information; that a shopper needs, to make a decision of purchase.  Also, it should be kept in mind to follow the best description format for the products, such as bullet points.

QL Tip: It is advised in general that 350 and 400 words would be enough to describe the main features and benefits of a particular product.

Apart from adding the product description in detail, you can also add blogs to the e-commerce website. Blogs could include keywords that are needed to improve the overall ranking of the website. Backlinko analysis of 1 million search results showed that the average Google first page result is 1,890 words long.

2. Reviews not included on the site:

The user reviews about the product or service affect the search results.92% of consumers now read online reviews.

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The impact of adding user reviews is clear and unambiguous. By adding reviews, we can’t say that SEO ranking will improve solely because of getting more reviews. For example, an analysis of over 30,000 businesses was conducted by Yotpo. These businesses added user reviews to their site and measured how this impacted organic search traffic. Within nine months after the implementation of reviews, they found that Google page views per month grew by 30%.

If you also fear of not including user reviews due to negative feedback, then please include it, the results are almost sure to be positive. Also, it will uplift sales. Reviews produce an average of 18% uplift in sales.

3. Improper migration strategy of e-commerce platforms:

Most of the e-commerce sites are built using third-party platforms. This is because they want to focus more on their core business rather than web development.

Sometimes websites outgrow one platform and switch to another as their market shares increases. Also, they switch platforms to gain access to previously unavailable features.

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Well, switching platforms can hamper rankings. Many companies wait till they finish the migration of e-commerce platforms and then go for SEO. Don’t do this mistake. Whenever you make any changes in your e-commerce platform, make sure that an SEO professional is always involved in it from the beginning.

4. Not able to develop informational content and focusing more on transactional keywords:

It is very important to add informational keywords that would be able to target the customers who are a bit further up in the funnel. Sometimes, focusing too much on certain keywords usually falls under the failed strategy. For example, it is very difficult to rank for keyword “money”, but this doesn’t mean that you can entirely neglect it.

Apart from adding informational keywords, you should perform a site: search in order to find out which page on-site already ranks best for any given keyword.

Ranking for less competitive phrases adds to the traffic along with improving overall reputation with the search engines. This might be because it influences behavioural metrics. You can take help of SEMrush to find keyword difficulty. When you analyze your existing rankings to see which keywords are already performing well, you can make changes to optimize for those keywords.

QL Tip: Look for keyword rankings in Google Search Console or SEMrush to identify keywords ranking on the second page or so. If these keywords are ranking without being optimized, take them as a golden opportunity and capitalize on them.

5. Site redesigns which are poor:

You might find sites, that, after redesigning gained traffic and also those which lost all the traffic because of it. The latter one is more painful, a redesign was done to beautify the site, incorporating new features. If you redesign your site, without considering SEO, then this is bound to happen. Those pages that were ranking well can get vanished, the content might get changed; thereby, turning a win-win situation to a lost one.

Whenever you change URLs, make use of 301 redirects. This will retain the link popularity that is attributed to the site and help the transfers to the new URL. The 301 redirect shows that indexed URL has moved. The search engine then de-index the old URL and index the new one.

It is advised to create a benchmark metrics including rankings of the site, home page rank, domain authority, and the no. of pages that are indexed in Google with the site: domain.com search. This will be beneficial for comparisons post-launch.

Concluding Lines:

Start looking at your site and take out problems, if any, related to the information that you have provided on your website. By analyzing the problems and fixing those on time, you will able to rank high in the search results of search engine.

Your valuable views are most welcome in the comments below.