Written on November 28th, 2011 by tasha
November has been National Family Caregiver Month, which means the press was especially open to stories about family caregiving. It’s a great time to do something special to honor family caregivers. While they may not be your clients directly, they are key decision-makers and are often the ones to initiate, and in private duty contexts, actually pay for your services.
Plan November activities that make the family caregiver’s life easier and let the press know.
Sponsoring educational events or launching an educational service is known as “content marketing.” Ideas for content marketing include a workshop or webinar you can record and make available later. An e-newsletter, or an online library of educational articles (we call this an “e-library”) is another form of content marketing. If you follow best practices for Facebook or blogging, 80% of your posts will be educational for your audience; only 20% will be about you and your service.
The wonderful part about content marketing is that you have a great resource that others will be likely to share, including the press.
Here are ways that some of my clients have been getting media coverage:
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Tags: content marketing
Posted in Family Caregivers, GCM Marketing, Home Health Marketing, Hospice Marketing, Media Advocacy, Private Duty Marketing
Written on November 2nd, 2011 by tasha
In honor of National Family Caregivers Month, we’re completing our series on search engine optimization by reporting on the topics family caregivers seem to be searching for on Google, Bing, etc.
To begin with, according to Pew Internet and American Life, health information seeking is the third most popular Internet activity, preceded only by email and using a search engine generally. Eight out of every 10 Internet users seeks health information online. Family caregivers are more active in their searching than any other group (including patients), often by a double-digit margin.
An analysis of health information searches relating to elder care revealed that: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: search engine optimization
Posted in Family Caregivers, GCM Marketing, Home Health Marketing, Hospice Marketing, Internet Marketing, Private Duty Marketing, Research Results
Written on September 7th, 2011 by tasha
My last blogpost was specifically about how to use keywords for search optimization. In particular, I talked about picking words that people who are actively looking for services (service seekers) are likely to use.
What is interesting with search engine optimazation (SEO) is that specific language matters:
- “Hospice care” gets more than 10 times the searches that “hospice service” gets.
- “Care management” gets 1.5 million searches per month, but “geriatric care management” doesn’t get enough to register on Google’s abacus.
- Even misspellings count. For instance “homecare” gets nearly 15 times the searches as “private duty.”
How to reach those people who need your service, but don’t know what the genre is called? I call this the “pre-seeker” audience. These are the folks who later say, “I wish we had known about you sooner.”
Here’s what I recommend:
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Tags: search engine optimization
Posted in GCM Marketing, Home Health Marketing, Hospice Marketing, Internet Marketing, Private Duty Marketing
Written on August 9th, 2011 by tasha
Many of you have been asking me privately for more information about how to increase the chances you will come up high on a search engine result. Happy to oblige!
As we described in a past post about how to increase your search engine ranking, the first criteria for getting listed in a search result is that the content on your page seems to be about the keyword or phrase that the searcher typed in. To deliver relevant results, Google and the other search engines look at all the words on each of your pages (the home page and pages deeper in your site), and for each word on each page they assign what might be called a “relevance score.”
No one knows exactly the formula for weighting keywords, but search optimization professionals have observed that words in special positions get stronger results. For instance, the search engines seem to assign points based on Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: search engine optimization
Posted in GCM Marketing, Home Health Marketing, Hospice Marketing, Internet Marketing, Private Duty Marketing
Written on July 27th, 2011 by tasha
“Media advocacy” is the strategic engagement of the mass media to further a social or public policy initiative. A superb example of this was the On Our Own Terms documentary by Bill Moyers. When the series was aired on PBS, a companion website with Community Action pages was launched to support a media advocacy campaign to raise awareness concerning the need for increased public and private discussion of end-of-life care.
With promotion by the local media, many communities organized public showings and in the following months a movement began that resulted in over 360 end-of-life coalitions forming throughout the country. I remember my coalition in Eugene, Oregon identified transitions of care as our biggest issue and worked to create more connection and communication between providers. We were not alone. Across the country, other coalitions were also looking at the problem of continuity. Now, nearly 10 years later, improving care transitions is a top initiative for Medicare. I do not think that is coincidence.
In the next few months, I see several exciting opportunities for media advocacy around elder care issues. There are some special doorways open to us.
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Posted in GCM Marketing, Home Health Marketing, Hospice Marketing, Internet Marketing, Media Advocacy
