How to Reach a Difficult Audience through Content
Consulting firm marketing role focuses on connectivity
Meryl K. Evans, Editor, B2B Social Media Digest,
interviews Dale Wolf, Healthcare Marketing Consultant
Reach a Difficult Audience through Content
The healthcare industry faces a unique challenge, finding ways to cut costs without affecting the quality of patient care. Sacrificing care means the difference between life and death. Furthermore, hospital decision-makers are so busy that they have built shells around them to protect their time and sanity.
So how does a consulting firm targeting this market break through hospital senior leaders’ protective shells, earn their trust, gain credibility and build a relationship? The way to go is to reach the prospects where they are and use content focused on their needs not the company’s own. That’s what works for Compass Clinical Consulting.
Before charging ahead with social media, Compass needed to update its brand. It changed the company’s name from Compass Group to Compass Clinical Consulting so its clients and prospects know exactly what the company does. This, combined with the customer-centric approach, has helped Compass accelerate brand awareness in a short time.
Compass Clinical Consulting social media strategy
Compass strives to develop useful content for hospital leaders to improve how they run their hospitals. This marketing strategy includes content that reinforces Compass’ brand, establishes credibility and trust, and encourages future clients to engage with employees to see if the Compass approach fits their needs. This ties in with social media because all content appears in direct mail, blogs, Web sites, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, news releases, articles and the company’s online news room.
All of these messages support the company’s brand promise: “We help hospital leaders reduce the cost of delivering safe, quality healthcare.” Its social media strategy is to keep it simple by focusing on social media that hospital marketing departments use. Dale Wolf, director of education and information services, reports that about 10 percent of the company’s market segment uses social media, making Compass an early entrant into social media. “Being in on the ground floor is giving us the experience to master these media as more hospitals come on board,” he says.
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Besides that, the company appears on page one of search engine results for its keyword phrases. Social media is positively affecting its search engine findability.
Because the consulting business is a relationship business, social media fit the company’s business model. Wolf explains, “We must communicate with people busier than in any other market segment I have ever worked. This is a tough wall to crack. Building awareness for hospital successes will help. Until then, we send our content out via every reasonable medium on the premise that a good percentage will get through the barriers.” The executives make up one segment; the company also works to connect with news reporters who cover healthcare.
In the beginning, Compass limited its scope for social media by starting with blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn. After becoming comfortable with these, they are planning to expand their social media scope. The PR director also manages other uses of social media on his own.
Building a business case for social media
Compass has always included social media in its marketing plan. Part of that could be because of Wolf’s success in using social media in his previous job. He has also added social media to sections in the marketing plan that covers public relations because social media ties into public relations.
As far as its business case goes, Compass management doesn’t believe that senior leaders use social media, and the older managers haven’t made it a habit to use social media. However, they know that future leaders will enter the business with social media skills. “So some of the decision-making on this was faith on the part of our senior managers. They do clearly see how it impacts Google search, and ‘findability’ is one of our key marketing themes so that helped in the rollout,” Wolf says.
The company needs to reach people including board members, CEOs, COOs, other executives and quality directors who work long hours. They’re very tough people to reach. “This makes it very difficult to deliver a message with sufficient frequency so the message will stick. Every touchpoint becomes more critical,” he says.
Measuring success
The company started its social media program 18 months ago with limited resources, so it has not arrived at a point to build a comprehensive metrics program. But Compass still does the following activities to measure its success:
- Track news release distribution through MarketWire.
- Track Web and blog traffic using WordPress stat tools.
- Track email open and clickthroughs.
- Experiment with Google Analytics.
“The single most important metric is how many discussions we generate with senior hospital leaders. We always ask callers or other contacts how they learned about Compass, and we identify sales leads that result from particular campaigns or from Google search. The resulting sales validate that we are moving in the right direction,” says Wolf. (He recommends a Compass article that explains how social media helps the bottom line.)
Advice to businesses
Social media is not a magic bullet that drives sales for the firm. It is a bullet. “Carry a six-shooter or an automatic weapon that lets you shoot more than one bullet. The Lone Ranger’s silver bullet worked in the Wild West but not in the hectic marketplace we all now reside in.” says Wolf. He advises businesses to consider these four activities when looking into a social media strategy:
1. Work with a consultant who knows social media. The consultant should know how social media integrates with publicity, online search and Web traffic generation.
2. Jump in slow. Don’t try to do everything at once because swallowing the sun is a tough act.
3. Start with your customer-centric content strategy. Make the commitment to generate content on a constant basis. Marketing is no longer about advertising (not to say advertising is not important); it is about doing a lot of things right and realizing that customer-centric marketing is about helping customers learn how to do their work better. When you help customers, they will remember you.
4. Pull is better than push. Since pull is less predictable, it requires courage of conviction, consistency and constancy.
“When marketers look at social media as an end to themselves, they are making a mistake. Social media are simply a cloud-based content distribution system that is remarkably fast, cost efficient and hopefully viral,” Wolf says. “We have as Robert Frost wrote, ‘miles to go before we sleep,’ but we are making rapid progress.”
Compass Clinical Consulting Social Media Elements
Goal: The primary goal for Compass is to complete consulting engagements so clients have a successful experience with positive, measurable and sustainable results.
Social media tools: Compass uses social media to distribute its content in a variety of ways and to connect with its hard-to-reach target market:
1. Content distribution. Marketing coordinates with each practice leader to produce content, including white papers, blog posts and Web content. They distribute white paper content by (1) sending the printed white papers directly to decision-makers by postal mail or PDF versions by email, or (2) sending a promotional letter that encourages decision-makers to visit the Web site and download the content. Compass posts all content in its Knowledge Center where spiders can detect it and make it available for online searches to improve search presence.
2. Blog: Staff repurposes white papers for the blog and manages three blogs.
3. Twitter: The company automatically tweets content on corporate (@compasscc) and personal Twitter accounts. Tweets consist of headlines aimed mainly at news media.
4. LinkedIn: Staff posts content in discussion groups on LinkedIn.
5. YouTube: The company posts all videos on its corporate YouTube account.
6. Flickr: Compass posts all images and photos on its Flickr account.
7. Social bookmark sites: The company also links to content on social bookmarking sites like FirendFeed, Stumbleupon and Delicious.
8. News releases: Staff creates news releases as content for posting on news release and online news sites, national media and local media, resulting in highly targeted, mass distribution of content.
The prime strategy for Compass is to create useful content. The use of media — traditional or social — is simply a means of distributing content as broadly as possible.
“We want to be seen for the thought-leaders that we are, creating and distributing relevant and useful content that helps leaders run better, more efficient hospitals. Social media is an extension that gives us more channels in which to talk with hospital leaders, at a relatively low cost,” Wolf says.
Results: When Compass Clinical Consulting started the transition to social media, the Web site received an average of 500 visits a month. The company now averages almost 10,000 visitors plus 4,000 RSS feed subscribers. Page views surpass 40,000 a month. Building traffic to registration pages is the central focus of all Compass campaigns.
Before implementing the program, a “Compass Group” Google search yielded one result in the first four pages. Now Compass “owns” all the results on the first four Google pages. The only exception is an occasional mention of other companies with Compass in their name. The company’s focus and persistent search engine optimization strategy — using key word phrases to improve search engine page results — has led to several client engagements.
One tweet in Twitter compelled Fox Business News to call Compass for a TV story on healthcare reform. A single story builds credibility and provides publicity.
About the author
Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or on Facebook.
About Dale Wolf
As president of Wolf Blumberg Krody Marketing, he and his two partners formalized their customer-centric approach into a data-driven methodology of direct marketing – coined as “contextual marketing.” This methodology led to growth for many national brands, hospitals and healthcare insurance companies.
After selling his ownership in WBK, Dale joined Cincom Systems, Inc. to lead product development of Web-based software to replicate his contextual marketing methodology and spearheaded customer-centric marketing strategy for many of Cincom’s brands. Dale was also an early adopter of blogging and other social media.
