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Tracking Marketing Results

By

Rob Kennedy on Reach

On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale speaks with Rob Kennedy from Audigy’s Marketing Team about tracking your marketing results! The two discuss traditional vs digital marketing, KPIs, shifting demographics and how you can get started making smarter decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.

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DAN: Good to have you here. You are the first guest on Reach who also has some radio experience. So it’s good to have a fellow radio veteran in the house with us today.

ROB KENNEDY: Pressure’s on.

DAN: Yeah, it is. That’s point of that. But we’re not going be talking about radio too much today. We’re going to be talking a little bit about metrics in reporting and how to really figure out whether your marketing is working. And I want to do that from your perspective, because– well, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do at Audigy so we can set the groundwork for the rest of the conversation.

ROB KENNEDY: Yeah, of course. I’ve been with Audigy for just about seven and a half years doing marketing and really bringing as much analytical perspective to the position as possible. Today, I’m working with all of our marketing managers, along with our marketing shared services team, to really make sure everybody is aligned, moving in the right direction, as efficiently as possible.

So analytics and the way our marketing is performing on all different levels through all different tactics is very important into making sure that that efficiency is strong and continuing to get stronger.

DAN: What kinds of things in general are you tracking as a marketing manager?

ROB KENNEDY: We track as much stuff as we possibly can. It’s important that if you’re investing $1 into anything, you want to make sure you’re maximizing that investment and getting the most out of that dollar as possible. So if we’re spending anything, be it a branding ad to just a standard website, we want to be able to track that investment and understand how that’s working so we can monitor and continue to grow that particular tactic.

So what we’re tracking on the most part is inbound calls on the more traditional tactics. And there’s also a level of the digital metrics. We’re looking at clicks and exposure.

DAN: Why are those things in particular important? You talked about how you’re using them, kind of. You’re using them to measure return on investment. But why are those ones more important than other metrics that you might track?

ROB KENNEDY: You’re talking about the actual calls coming in?

DAN: Yeah. Let’s use that as an example. Let’s talk about calls. Why would you talk about that rather than, for instance, the length of the call?

ROB KENNEDY: Well, the length of the call definitely plays an important aspect in it. But that’s more on the professional development and operational side of things. So we as marketing managers, our number one duty is to really drive that inbound call, or that interaction, that conversion.

Going back to that call that we’re talking about, if we can break everything down, no matter if we’re doing a print ad, a direct mail, even an outdoor billboard, or a shopping cart ad, one thing that each of those tactics has in common is going to be that call that we’re trying to drive in.

So by tracking those calls and relating those back to the dollar amount invested into those tactics, we start looking at a level playing field to find out our ROI or our return on investment.

DAN: And I’m guessing from what you’ve said so far that you’re using that as one of the primary ways that you’re evaluating whether a campaign or some sort of messaging is actually working. Is that right?

ROB KENNEDY: That’s correct.

DAN: OK.

ROB KENNEDY: You’re getting the hang of it.

DAN: Some of these questions are rhetorical, Rob.

[LAUGHING]

OK. So with all that in place, then, what can you tell me as a really high level observation about what you know about marketing for audiology practices? So for instance, can you tell me something about at a 50,000 foot level, what works and what doesn’t?

ROB KENNEDY: Sure. So investing money in marketing works. We see that the more dollars we put into the market through various marketing tactics, the more call volume we receive. So it’s a simple fact. Now when we start taking a look at how effective those dollars are working for us, that’s when the tracking really comes into play, because we really want to maximize each of those dollars, again, that we’ve put out there, so we’re not wasting money on a tactic that’s not performing as well as another tactic where we could be reinvesting those dollars back into.

DAN: There’s a direct correlation between how much you spend and how much you get back, but the rest of the game is really just fine tuning all of those particular practices and finding where you can make your money, go the farthest.

ROB KENNEDY: So all of that being said, we want to make sure that we’re not throwing too many dollars into a single tactic, where we’re realizing diminishing returns on that. So again, it always goes back to that tracking and how effectively are we tracking that return.

DAN: Let’s pretend that we just got to our monthly marketing report, and we’re looking at this to determine which tactics got us the most return for our money. What are you looking at on that report to figure out– to answer that question?

ROB KENNEDY: What we do is try to boil everything down to a cost per prospect call. We define a prospect as a lead. And really what that means is just a potential patient calling into the practice that we feel should have been booked into an appointment. So it’s not just any random call coming in. Those calls, are you hiring, where are you located, can we do your marketing for you– those type of calls we don’t count. That doesn’t really fit into the metrics with much value at all.

So we are actually identifying a prospect or a lead calling in, and somebody that we should book into an appointment. Bringing that call back to the dollars spent on that particular tactic, we get what we call a cost per prospect. And that puts every single tactic out on a level playing field, no matter if we’re spending say, $100 a week, or $100,000 a week on a tactic. It all boils down to that cost per prospect.

DAN: So it’s not only one of the most important ones. It’s also kind of a roll up for other metrics that fall beneath it that determine its effectiveness.

ROB KENNEDY: Exactly.

DAN: OK. So let’s take this a step further to what I’m sure many of our listeners are wondering. What kinds of tactics are performing well? I’m not going to make you open up all the secrets and secret folders or anything, but what do the campaigns that perform well in general have in common with each other?

ROB KENNEDY: Well, a low cost per prospect.

DAN: Is that the only thing?

ROB KENNEDY: In my eyes, yes.

DAN: Interesting.

ROB KENNEDY: I’m really looking at driving down that low cost per prospect. Going beyond that, we can get a lot more granular and talk about, is our marketing message that we’re putting out there that’s driving a low cost prospect, is that driving in a patient or a lead that might have a lot of questions of what we’re advertising, and not quite understanding the message that we’re trying to get across? Are we creating more objections out there or questions than answers?

DAN: Now the way that you answered that, the first part especially, made me think that there’s no silver bullet out there, which I think is generally accepted, but everyone still seems to be looking for it, despite knowing that. So we’re standing by that, that there’s no silver bullet.

ROB KENNEDY: The silver bullet lies in your tracking.

DAN: OK. I love to hear that. I love to hear that. Which kind of campaigns tend to have the best cost per prospect?

ROB KENNEDY: It really varies. We deal in our particular industry, the hearing care industry, with a much older demographic. So our target audience can be 60 years and older. So they tend to respond to some of the older, more traditional print or analog tactics, if you will, like direct mail.

But that phenomenon or that trend is changing quite dramatically right now as all these Baby Boomers are aging into our target audience. So a lot of our traditional marketing, like the newspaper and direct mail tactics, we’re starting to lose some of our return on that, or some of the performance that that used to give to us. Really to answer a question to what is performing best, it’s really the marketing mix that is performing best. And that’s not just one single tactic.

Say we do a direct mail and we get 10 calls off that direct mail. We’re able to track that because we put on a unique phone number on that direct mail piece. What we lose visibility to is how many of those folks did we just create interest in with that direct mail and end up going to, say, our website to learn a little bit more about the practice or our services, ended up calling us on our website.

You can also go back as far as we send direct mail out. A potential patient receives that direct mail. Patient A has never heard of this before. Tosses it aside immediately. Patient B has seen our newspaper ad in the newspaper over the past couple of weeks and thinks, hm, this is a great offer. I’m going to give them a call, but I’m going to go to their website first. So that lead generated with our newspaper inserts, followed through that direct mail, but yet we received that lead off of the website.

DAN: OK. I’m going to try and condense this into something real quick, because we just covered a lot there. So our calculation is getting more complex. We started off with there’s a direct correlation between what you spend and what you get. But there’s also that diminishing return. So kind of the shotgun method, I guess you could say silver pellets rather than a single silver bullet, is also going to help to push those things up. So you’ve got these things kind of multiplying each other towards your total cost per prospect.

Is that accurate? They kind of work together?

ROB KENNEDY: Yeah. I like the silver pellet.

DAN: Yeah. That sounds like it works, doesn’t it?

ROB KENNEDY: I might have to steal that from you.

DAN: OK. So we know that we’ve got to balance what’s working and what’s not working. How do you know how much you should invest in something if you’ve got a precipitous decline in its effectiveness? I mean, we’ve talked on this show before about how digital and traditional marketing practices are becoming increasingly unbalanced. But they still work. I mean, if there’s any demographic that will benefit from traditional practices, I think that the hearing care industry is going to fit it. So we should be hitting up those avenues, correct? But how do you know how much?

ROB KENNEDY: You know, it really goes back to that tracking. It always goes back to that tracking for me. In our more affluent markets, we’re seeing newspapers say, the return on direct response activities really decline there. We see it in the news all the time. There’s been newspapers closing, circulation is down, readership is down. So it’s tactics like that where we really need to keep a very close eye on that return that we’re getting from those.

We’re in a very interesting era right now in the way of the decline of more traditional marketing, direct marketing tactics, like direct mail and newspaper. The decline is getting so great that we are tracking that, and in some markets, it’s not working and we’ve had to step completely away from those tactics. And in other markets, the tactics are still performing fine. So we want to kind of still live there and milk all that we can out of those tactics before they start to decline too much. But in the long run, most everything’s moving on to that digital platform.

DAN: Are there any similarities between the markets that are succeeding with some of these tactics? For instance, does direct mail happen to work better in small rural communities than it would in, let’s say, Manhattan? Is that true, or can you even really say that definitively?

ROB KENNEDY: You can make generalizations that support that. But a lot of that has to do with how much competition you’re dealing with in the market and how much they’re actually mailing as well. Because when you start to really clutter up that mailbox, if we’re going to stick with the direct mail example, a patient could potentially get– and we hear this from a lot of our doctors out in the market– three, four, five, six direct emails per week from different competitors.

Now on a more dense market like Manhattan, yeah, there’s going to be a lot more competitors you’re dealing with. But you could also be in like a [INAUDIBLE] and be really focused on battling against a lot of competitors as well.

DAN: So there still is no silver bullet here, is what you’re saying. And there’s nothing that we can take from our global efforts and condense with certainty into any particular market.

ROB KENNEDY: Well, again, that silver bullet is tracking and analyzing all of your effort.

DAN: Fair enough. Let’s get back to the people that we’re hitting up. We talked a little bit about demographics. And I think that when we were talking about the shift or the unbalance between traditional and digital marketing, one of the things that is in the back of people’s minds is going to be the demographics that would traditionally use those platforms. Can you talk a little bit about how older and younger demographics might factor into audiology marketing?

ROB KENNEDY: Yeah, there’s some interesting dynamics there. Again, going back to our target audience, they’re still apt to use, say, tactics like the yellow pages, where– and I would say probably a 60-year-old or older is looking at a Yellow Page for practice or for information, whereas a younger generation, the Baby Boomers, they’ve already adopted the Google. And Google is the new Yellow Pages.

So there’s some interesting dynamics when you boil it down to even that level. So you’ve got sons and daughters out there doing research online for their moms, for their dads. So going back to kind of like that 80-20 rule that you hear a lot about, that’s kind of the 20%. But that’s growing as well. So we’ve got this whole spectrum of people looking just online, people looking just in print, and then there’s a whole gray area in between. So like I said, it’s an interesting era that we’re in right now as things are continuing to migrate to the more online digital platform.

DAN: So Rob, we’ve been focusing a lot on the show about tracking results, but let’s talk about the actual processes that go into that. Could you tell me what tools you use and how you use them to track these results?

ROB KENNEDY: Sure. There’s quite a few tools out there. There’s some online options and everything. I’m kind of old school. I love Excel. So for the way I track my marketing, pretty much any type of spreadsheet program is going to work for you. I simply log every single event in Excel, the tactic, the dates, the message or creative that I’m using, and then the cost. So we’re logging those elements before they happen. And then we’re tracking the call volume that each of those elements or each of those tactics produce on the back end. And really what we’re able to do in Excel specifically is you can filter by tactic, or sort by date, et cetera, and you can start to match up side by side how each of these tactics have performed against each other.

When you start to get a lot of data and you want to start summarizing, then pivot tables is a really key instrument within Excel. And if you don’t know how to do pivot tables, there’s a ton of YouTube videos and other resources out there that can talk about those type of pivot tables. But pivot tables essentially within Excel are a great way to take a lot of data and summarize it into a couple of points.

DAN: Just in case people don’t know, can we summarize in like two or three sentences what a pivot table is and why it’s so important to this?

ROB KENNEDY: Yeah, that’s a tough one to explain. You’ve got say, 200 points of data that you’re tracking. Some of it’s direct mail. Some of it could be some online. Some of it’s newspaper, newspaper insert. Some of its newspaper ads. And so you’ve got 200 different points of reference there. A pivot table can really transform all of that data to where you’re seeing all of your newspaper inserts summed up against all of your direct mail against all of your online ads.

And that’s just by choosing tactic as kind of the main data point that you’re looking for. You can do that by dates. You can do that by message or campaign. So there’s a lot of different ways you can summarize your data by slicing and dicing it via the pivot table.

DAN: So it sounds like it takes a lot of data entry, which is time consuming. But that sounds like the only way that you could really tell what’s working and what’s not.

ROB KENNEDY: True.

DAN: I get why you’re saying that this is so important.

ROB KENNEDY: It is a lot of time up front, some manual labor involved. But I think the payout on the backend is what’s worth it.

DAN: What kind of questions should members be asking you or their marketing manager that you can answer because of this Excel tracking.

ROB KENNEDY: A lot of questions that we get that I find probably the most valuable coming from members is what is working in similar markets to mine, or what is working with other practices a similar size as mine? We’re looking at newspaper inserts. We talked a little bit about how newspaper and more traditional marketing tactics are declining.

It’s not so in every market. So we’ve got some members who are seeing this decline in their newspaper inserts. And if they simply asked their marketing manager, what else is out there, what is working in other markets, we have that visibility to what’s working in those other markets. And we can make strong recommendations with the confidence behind the data to say, you need to do more paid search and lower our investment in newspaper, or even vice versa.

DAN: Are marketing managers available if members have questions about how they can do this from their practice?

ROB KENNEDY: All of our members are more than welcome to contact their marketing manager at any time to discuss this material, the results, what’s happening within their market, their own practice or their own efforts, or what’s happening in other practices, other markets. Our marketing managers present us on a monthly basis with our members on monthly [? SBU ?] calls. Sometimes we do weekly marketing touch base calls with members.

So there, we’re looking at the results of what’s happening specifically in your market. We’re looking for any trends that we can identify. Is our results improving, or are they worsening? And what do we want to do strategically to either keep them improving or turn around a downward trend?

And then on a quarterly basis, we do what is called a QBR, or a quarterly business review, whereas opposed to just taking a look at what tactics happened last month and how did they perform, we take a look at the entire quarter. And that’s where we really start taking a look at or identifying the trends on a little bit larger basis.

DAN: Can we talk a little bit about some of the KPIs that you might find during these analyzes that might not jump out at you as the most important. So I imagine that dollars and cents are going to be really important to people. But other smaller metrics, such as reach and frequency of use could be something that you might want to pay attention to determine the success of something if the dollars and cents don’t necessarily tell the whole story.

ROB KENNEDY: The key KPIs that we are tracking are essentially boiled down to cost per prospect, call, and cost per appointment. Those are real key KPIs. We could boil it down to response rate to say, direct mail. But going back to the terms that you brought up for reach and frequency, when our media buyers are approaching a market with a budget, reach and freak frequency plays a big role in how they or we as marketing managers want to spend those dollars.

We want to get a good mix of reach and a good mix of frequency. And what I mean by that is reach is how many people within your target audience are you talking to? So reach. How many are you reaching out to? And then the frequency is how many times are you reaching out to them with that message? So going back to say radio advertising, that is a great frequency medium, meaning you’re not reaching a lot of people, but you have the ability to get your message out there several times a day.

Newspaper, on the other hand, you can really only hit them once a day, some newspapers only once a week, but they’re delivered to a lot of people. So newspaper’s strength is in reach. So when you’re looking for a good reach and frequency mix, if you have radio and newspaper in a market, you should be doing OK in the traditional media sense.

Now TV is a lot more expensive, but it provides good reach and frequency together, especially when you’re looking at broadcast as opposed to like the cable networks.

DAN: I see, I see. So you’re tracking these things in order to come up with your strategy.

ROB KENNEDY: Yeah. So reach and frequency, we’re using on the front end as we are strategizing. We’re tracking the performance of the tactics that we put out into the market on the backend, and then looking for trends and adjusting our marketing moving forward, our strategies and our recommendations moving forward based upon all those results.

DAN: All right, Mr. Kennedy, we are at the end of the show, so we’re going to wrap things up with our favorite part, the part where you tell us your top three takeaways. What do you got?

ROB KENNEDY: Number one is to make sure that you’re logging and tracking all of your tactics, whether it be newspaper insert, paid search, campaign, website performance, we want to log every single specific event, log the investment that went into that, or what that particular tactic cost, and then on the backend, track the prospect calls and the appointments that those tactics have generated. So that’s my first point.

Second point would be to take that data and look for trends. Is our performance getting better, or is it not getting better? That’s going to identify tactics that we need to pay closer attention to if we need to increase our performance. And my third point is really making those little microadjustments in each of those tactics to keep them improving month over month. They’re going to plateau at some point, but that is when tracking becomes even more critical, because sometimes at a plateau is an indicator of a decline.

DAN: All right. Well, we’re going to leave it at that. Rob Kennedy, thank you again. I learned a lot, just like I do every time I talk to you.

ROB KENNEDY: I had a great time. Thanks for having me.

Website Templates

By

Cy Vedder from Audigy

On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale speaks with Cy Vedder, a member of Audigy’s Digital Marketing Team. The topic for today is Website Templates, why they are necessary and why they can be a big benefit for your business. We also discuss the evolution of the templates we have created on behalf of our members, including the testing done to ensure your web site performs to the best of its capabilities.

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DANIEL PARSCALE: Good morning, sir. How are you doing today?

CY VEDDER: Good morning. I’m doing pretty well. How are you?

DANIEL PARSCALE: I’m good, thank you. I want to say thanks for coming to join us on Reach. You are one of my teammates on the Digital Team, and because you maybe tell us a little bit about your role and what your expertise is.

CY VEDDER: Yeah, absolutely. So I am one of the web specialists and I basically just worked on our members websites. I did the builds, I’d do all the edits, make sure everything’s up to date, and also focus on the search engine optimization side of things and make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make the websites rank well and get prospects in the door.

DANIEL PARSCALE: So we wanted to bring you in today to talk about what we’ve learned from building hundreds and hundreds of websites over the years. We have several hundred clients who actively use our website templates, and we have developed multiple templates for several of those members. So there’s quite a bit of learning curve that we’ve experienced over the several years that the team has been around.

And since we bring up the word “templates”, I think that the best place to start is with one of the questions that I know historically we’ve gotten a lot. A lot of people hear the word “template” when they think about a website, and they say, I don’t know if I feel comfortable having a template for my website, because I don’t want my business to be represented exactly the same as everybody else’s. And at face value, I’d say, well, that sounds like a fair question. But I think it goes a little bit deeper than that, right?

CY VEDDER: I get that concern. And the members, they want their brand and their website to be unique and stand out. And we are able to do that even within templates. One of the things we’ve learned over the course of developing all of our templates is that there is a fine line between having the flexibility but also having the scalability of the template. And what that provides to the team is that we’re able to spend more time on the strategy for members. But with our latest iteration of Merriweather, there is a lot of flexibility built in and there is a lot of customization that can be done.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah, this is one that we’ve talked a lot about internally, as well as to our members, because we’re very excited about the opportunities that you can have with us. But as you say, it’s still a template with a lot of flexibility. What are some of the benefits to us and to members of both– well, let’s start with the benefits of the scalability factor of this. Why is that useful to us and then why is that useful to members as well?

CY VEDDER: I mean obviously, the most obvious benefit to us is that it– well, quite a few things– but it allows us to spend a little less time on the actual build and more time focusing on the strategy behind things and getting more prospects in the door for our members, as opposed to building out a brand new site that we have no experience with, that we’ve never touched, and trying to learn everything as we go each and every time. That just is not doable. It’s a disservice to our members, honestly, to try and take that approach. So it gives us more time to then spend more time on our members.

DANIEL PARSCALE: OK, and then the members benefit from that, obviously, if we’ve invested the time and resources into these templates. They benefit from having a template that’s designed with several years of education behind it, really, or learning, I should say.

CY VEDDER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean every iteration and every template that we’ve used, we’ve learned what was good and what was bad. And we’ve made sure that we put those good things forward in the next one and we remove the bad things. And it’s, as you say, years and hundreds of websites of experience. And that have gone into this latest template and it’s proven– we have the data and all the experience behind it– it’s proven to work. And we pass that on to members.

DANIEL PARSCALE: So another factor of this, too, that is really exciting for everyone involved is the time it takes actually to build and launch a website. I remember that several years ago it took as much as several months to actually go from concept to launching a website, because these things are very, very, very complex, even with something like WordPress or another CMS to back it. But now we can do it considerably faster because we know exactly what the end result is going to look like before we built it, right?

CY VEDDER: A couple years ago it could take two or three months just to do the build, not even go into review and revision with the members and get their feedback. But now– I mean we’ve had a couple instances where a member came on board and they needed a website immediately, it was like a high priority. And we had a turnaround of about a week once their style guide was built and finalized. I’ve knocked it out, they didn’t have any edits, it went live in a week. And that’s a huge value to our members, huge benefit of being able to use templates.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, I want to get into the guts of what it is that these templates actually are built with then. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the things that we’ve learned over the years, good or bad.

CY VEDDER: One of the things that we talk about a lot in the industry, as well as internally on the team, right now is mobile responsiveness. And this wasn’t always kind of an industry imperative, so it wasn’t built into our earlier templates. Now it is.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Can you tell me a little bit more about what mobile responsiveness means and why we use it?

CY VEDDER: For a long time mobile responsive didn’t exist, it wasn’t necessary. But nowadays that’s the bulk of searches on phones and tablets, and it’s imperative that you have a mobile responsive website. And the search engines will actually ding you if you don’t.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Could you stop for just a second and define what mobile responsive means? Because I think that some of the listeners might not fully understand what they’re getting from that service.

CY VEDDER: Basically, it just means that the website will scale down to whatever size browser you’re viewing. So whether it’s a tablet, or a phone, or if you just minimize the screen on your desktop, the site is actually responsive and will shrink down and stay proportionate with everything that’s on the website to whatever screen you’re viewing it on.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Got it. So that sounds handy. If I’m looking at a website on my phone, for instance, why is it so important though? I mean is that not just a creative kind of addition?

CY VEDDER: No, it’s all about user experience. And if it’s non-mobile-responsive and you’re viewing it on your phone, the text is going to be tiny, unreadable, or it’ll bleed off to the edge, and you’ll have to scroll a long time to read just one sentence. And it creates a terrible user experience. And that really is one of the main things that Google, specifically, but search engines– it’s all about the user experience, and if you don’t have a more responsive site, it’s not good.

Google, in particular, they are constantly drilling into your head that for good SEO you want to provide a good user experience, because they always want to provide the best answer to a query. And if the answer, or excuse me, if the site that they take you to doesn’t provide that information in a usable manner, then it’s not as useful, so it’s no longer the best answer to the query. So they prioritize sites that have mobile responsiveness built in, because they want to make sure that everyone is providing these things in a user-friendly manner.

DANIEL PARSCALE: So can you tell me a little bit about a feature that you get a lot of requests about and what we’ve learned about that feature over the years?

CY VEDDER: Big requests we get a lot from our members are rotating banners. And it’s ill-advised, I’d say. And it’s because there’s a lot of studies out there and our own research– we’ve found that the patients don’t utilize the banner’s as our members would hope for. They find the information through other avenues and the click-through rates just aren’t really all that compelling, not to mention the fact that on mobile a lot of times banners don’t even really become all that relevant. They’re tiny little images that you can’t read the text, the button is too small. It goes back to user experience.

Above all else, the best homepage image banner, hero or hero image sort of thing is– we always try and advise this– but custom imagery, custom photography of the member, of his or her staff and the team behind the website, those usually perform pretty well, honestly. And it’s just that little extra customization and it goes a long way.

DANIEL PARSCALE: To back up what you were saying earlier about the effectiveness or lack thereof of many banners sliding, it’s hard sometimes to follow what it is that you should– what decision you should make when you have three or four, or sometimes more different options in the same place showing themselves in rapid succession. And sometimes you can forget that the decision you want is even there. I know that on sites where I’ve seen a banner, a slider, sometimes I will finally read all of what’s in the frame, decide that I’m interested in it, and then it’ll move away. And I won’t have a way to click back sometimes.

So what I like about the hero images that we use– and by that we mean basically a large image that is covering the span of the window at that particular place, so it’s basically a banner, but it’s a wide screen banner– but what I like about using those is that because it acts as more of a background, it really helps to hyperfocus the call-to-action that’s laying above it– so call today, request an appointment or something like that.

And it uses the picture less as the focus point and more as a reminder to why that call-to-action is provocative in the first place. That’s my personal take on it, I don’t know if other people feel the same way. But as you say, we came to this decision to use these by default with our newest templates, because we’ve seen differences or, frankly, just different results with other methods.

CY VEDDER: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree wholeheartedly that the hero image is the better alternative.

DANIEL PARSCALE: I think a lot of other sites, too– I mean we talk about our templates, but this is becoming the norm across websites on the internet, and that’s not specific to an industry. So let’s move on to another feature that we’ve experimented with a lot over the years and, I think, come up with some pretty good results in our latest templates.

This is an under-the-hood kind of feature and one that, if you’re just visiting website because you want to get information, you probably won’t notice. But it’s really good for SEO and for user experience. And what I’m talking about is site structure. Do you want to lead us through what site structure is and maybe some of your experience and how that’s developed over the years on our templates?

CY VEDDER: Site structure is very important. And there were a few versions of templates over the years that didn’t quite hit the mark, that we refined and made better in the next iteration. But basically, what you want to do is, you need to separate the content out. So you have a Services menu and all the services they list. And there you have a Resources menu, the resources are listed under that. And we used to combine it all into one and it would make for a confusing– it could potentially make the patient confused reading through it not really sure what’s the service, what’s resource. So you need to be able to split those out.

We tested one version at the Audiology– the hearing aids specific menu– of a long-tail keyword called “find”. We used “find hearing aids” and that didn’t really work out. That’s not a long-tail cure that patients are actually searching for.

DANIEL PARSCALE: So the thinking was that you would name the folder based off of something that really told the story about why people would be getting there, in theory, but in practice, it wasn’t what the content was really about, because people weren’t actually searching for how to find hearing aids. They were searching for– they were looking to find hearing aids, and that’s a different concept, if you’re really whittling it down.

CY VEDDER: Yeah, absolutely. No one’s searching “find hearing aids.” People are searching “hearing aids in city or state.” So it’s little things that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, but they make a big difference. And it’s just a process of testing, and refining, and optimizing it further, and making sure that you learn from your mistakes and you put the best foot forward.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Now that we know that, what have we done to change it? What’s our process going forward?

CY VEDDER: Going forward– we dropped the “find.” Specifically, it’s no longer “find hearing aids/hearing aids styles.” It’s “hearing aids, hearing aids styles, receiver in canal hearing aid.” It’s straightforward and it uses the keywords that we’re trying to rank for. But more than that, It’s the most relevant search.

DANIEL PARSCALE: I see the value of this because I work in this, and so do you. I think it might still be hard to really understand why this is valuable. But I’ve got an idea that might help to explain it. And it’s for anybody who used to go to the library and have to look for a book. They would go a walk down the aisles and they would look for the section that that book belongs in– mystery, or sci-fi, or cooking, or whatever it is. And the site structure of your website is very much like that. If you have a cookbook in your romance novel section, then it doesn’t make sense. And likewise, if your sections are not labeled at all or they’re not labeled properly, it is going to make it much more difficult for you to find the book.

Again, we already touched base on user experience. This is, basically, like making a very simple roadmap. Or, I guess, you could almost call it the Dewey Decimal System of your websites, because it shows you exactly how things ought to be catalogued. Because of that it’s really good for patients who are viewing your site. And Google, in turn, also appreciates that and ranks it more appropriately.

One of the features that we’re really satisfied with over the years is how much we’ve built out and grown our content. We have dozens and dozens of pages that have unique content, that are specific to the industry, and they perform well for SEO as well. Could you maybe talk a little bit about how that content has grown and how it’s presented in different ways that have improved over the years?

CY VEDDER: It was a total revamp of all of our content, to be quite honest. We had proprietary graphics created, and icons. And we presented the content in a very visually enticing manner. It’s broken up, it’s easily digestible chunks, and it looks good as well as performs well for SEO.

And it’s strong quality content that is actually very informative. And we have dozens of pages of that, as opposed to some of our competitors who maybe don’t. They only have a dozen pages or less, and it might not even be as good of quality content. We have a lot to offer our members on our templates and we’ve evolved it quite a bit from when we first started.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah, it takes a long time to build that content out, too. When I am looking through audiologists websites that aren’t our members and they aren’t on our sites, and sometimes I’ll see a single page that has every single thing that the website has to offer on one page. And I look at that and I’m like, there’s not really a whole lot of information here.

I’ve even seen audiologists websites where they’ll have 30 pages dedicated, literally 30 pages dedicated to videos or some sort of non-service-related feature. And then they won’t have a single page about one of the primary services that they provide, it’s just not there. So really, identifying and then building that stuff out, so that it’s useful, is time consuming and a huge asset, I think, to everyone involved.

CY VEDDER: Really, what sets us apart from a lot of the competitors is that if you were to buy a template, or if our member was to buy a template or go to a developer and say, buy me a template, build a website, all they’d get is the skeleton. It is just the structure of the website, there is no content. They have to then get all that written and created, and that’s going to be expensive, or time consuming, or a little bit of both.

But with our template it comes ready to go with dozens and dozens of pages of content that is professionally written by copywriters that only focus on audiology and ENT fields. Its been vetted by biologists and ENT doctors. We have resources at our disposal to ensure that it is accurate and relevant. And we’ve done our due diligence and research to make sure that these are topics that are being searched and will draw in prospects or patients.

And it’s ready to go. As we touched earlier, it can be a quick turnaround. And within a couple of weeks they have a quality website that is unique and customized to their specifications, with dozens of pages of rich quality content that’s professionally done.

DANIEL PARSCALE: We also know what to do with it once we have that content. We don’t just toss it out there and hope it sticks in the right place. As we were talking about with site structure, those two things go hand-in-hand. We not only develop the content, but then we know where it belongs, and we file it away in the right place on the site.

An example that I think is really relevant– and I’ve actually seen some statistical evidence for this being a benefit for our newer templates– is we realized early on that we wanted to provide information about providers at the practices. So we implemented a page on staff biographies, and then over time we started to specify it more by building out, well, taking it from a single page about everybody and then making specific pages based on the person.

And what I’ve seen in the analytics for several of our sites is that people do search for the names of providers, because they’re already familiar with them, or word of mouth, or whatever the reason. It makes it easier for them to find that person’s page, or more likely, I should say, because it’s distributed in that very specific site structure, too. So the content is well created, but then it’s also doing its job, because it’s put into the skeleton, the template, in the right way.

CY VEDDER: Back in the day, it was just one page for all and we listed all the providers. And as it evolved and we split it out into separate pages, it is just more opportunity. There is a name brand recognition for a lot of our members. The patients know the provider or they have heard of the provider. And it is an excellent way to capture some more long-tail keywords, if you will.

DANIEL PARSCALE: One of the things that we really focus on when we’re building out the user experience on these sites is we want to make it so that patients can find the help that they need. So we’ve discovered that the best way or the most likely way that they will actually convert into a lead is to get that help. And then we build out our sites so that’s more likely to happen. And in fact, we have this CRO program which is designed specifically to not only test and implement those things but to learn from it, so that we can continue to evolve our templates down the line.

CY VEDDER: A perfect example is even just on the home page of our Merriweather template. It’s almost like a story that you’re reading. As the patient scrolls down the page, they see, hopefully, a nice custom photo of the staff audiologists and all the team, and some sort of call-to-action or “welcome to our website.” There’s the welcome paragraph that explains who the practice is, what their specialties are. This is a little value proposition right there.

And as it scrolls down, you see the hearing aids that they provide, that entices the patient. They see all the different styles that they provide. There’s testimonials, the patient can see what previous patients have said. And at the bottom of the page there is that call-to-action banner. The goal is that the patient sees all these things about the practice, and it entices them and it makes them realize that this is the provider, this is the practice they want to go to. And that ends with the conversion.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DANIEL PARSCALE: All right, Cy, we are at the point in the show where we’re going to summarize everything that we’ve learned today, which is quite a bit. Could you give us your top three takeaways from our episode on what we’ve learned in building websites?

CY VEDDER: Yeah, we have top three takeaways. Number one, scalability versus flexibility, and the idea of templates– it’s necessary and it’s not a bad thing, and I think that’s important to note. At the end of the day it gives us more time to be able to focus on our members.

Number two, site structure and populating the template, and all of our content. We’ve learned a lot and we have refined how we implement these things. And it’s a constant evolution, it’s never changing, we’re never done. We’re always looking to optimize further and make it better. And that’s most relevant in our content. It’s leagues above what it was five to eight years ago.

Number three– probably the biggest takeaway– templates aren’t bad. People are hesitant to go with the template, they think it’s not going to be unique. But there is a lot of flexibility in place, and a lot of customization is available to our members with our template.

DANIEL PARSCALE: If someone listening is interested in getting one of our sites or learning more about it, how can they contact us to find out more?

CY VEDDER: If any audiologists or ENT practitioners are interested in our web services, they are currently only offered to members. So the best place to start would be reaching out to Membership Development, and their email is membershipdevelopment@audigy.com. In

DANIEL PARSCALE: Very good. Thank you again, Cy, for being a guest on the show. I hope to have you back on again some day soon.

CY VEDDER: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Creating Audiology Content

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On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale speaks with Shareefah Hoover, one of Audigy’s copywriters and content producers, about writing content for an audiology specific audience and some of its challenges.

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DANIEL PARSCALE: Content generation is an important part of every brand’s marketing experience, but sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start and how to do it properly. Today, Shareefah is going to walk us through copywriting in informal and useful tones in a technical and medical world.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Hi. I’m Shareefah Hoover, copywriter with Audigy.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Good morning, Shareefah. How are you today?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Good morning, Daniel. I’m doing fabulously. Really good to be here. Thank you.

DANIEL PARSCALE: I know. It’s a beautiful day finally for the first time in several months, I would say.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Sunshine.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Mm-hmm. All right. So we’ve got a very interesting conversation today. Why don’t you tell us what we’re going to be talking about?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: We’re going to be talking about writing about sensitive and technical matters in an informative tone, keeping your audience riveted and interested.

DANIEL PARSCALE: That’s a tough thing to do. And it’s part of every written piece that we produce, whether it’s for the web, for print, or anywhere else. But we have to produce a lot of content for that. So this is a really consistent challenge that copywriters, like yourself, must deal with all the time.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: It’s a consistent challenge. It’s an exciting challenge, because everyone wants to be captured in a way that gets their attention and holds their attention. If we don’t accomplish that, they move on. We all know that, because we’re audiences as well. We’re consumers as well. And we have a lot that’s tugging at our time and tugging at our attention.

DANIEL PARSCALE: So let’s put ourselves firstly in the consumer’s shoes. In general, how would you describe, what is it that people actually want from an informative piece?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: They want information that’s going to help them, or that’s going to excite them, that’s going to intrigue them, that’s going to help them help someone else. The same things that we’re looking for when we’re watching a show, when we’re reading a book, when we’re watching a documentary, when we’re listening to someone on the radio.

When we’re trying to get home or trying to get to work, we’re in drive time. And we’re listening to shows that are running during the commuting hour. Those same themes of what inspires us, moves us, interests us, saddens us, angers us, excites us, makes us want to shop, listen, learn, do what we need to do that allows us to thrive.

DANIEL PARSCALE: The first thing that comes to my mind, when you put it in that way, is my personal commute. And I tend to listen to NPR on most days. And I think about how all of those things are present, whether it’s in the tones and inflections of the DJ, who happens to be speaking, or the newscaster, or just the content that they’re talking about.

It’s unusual sometimes, and it’s also something that’s relevant, and it’s usually of the now as well. So it’s always, it’s personal, in a certain sense.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Isn’t that the truth? And sometimes what we don’t necessarily appreciate, when it comes to what we’re listening to during drive time, whether it’s NPR or whatever else we’re listening to, that someone wrote just about everything that you’re hearing. And they thought about that.

They thought about those ways that are going to move you in terms of storytelling, in terms of transitions from one story to the next. Thinking about putting the listener in that moment and doing their best to reach some or all of the senses– the taste, touch, smell, feeling in terms of emotion, or just listening– all of those things, and being able to do that with words.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Let’s look at the different kinds of people who are consuming the materials that we’re talking about. And specifically, when we’re talking about audiology and medical practices in general, we’re looking at, I would say, two general categories. We’re talking about professionals, and we’re talking about laypeople. Can you talk a little bit about– well, first of all do, you agree with that? And secondly, if you do, what are the differences, if any, in the way that content should be produced for them?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: I agree with what you’re saying. We’re talking to businesses, and we’re talking to consumers. We’re talking to medical professionals, audiologists. We’re talking to ENT professionals. We’re talking to business owners. We’re talking to front office staff. And we’re also talking to patients.

We’re talking to folks who have expert knowledge. We’re talking to people who have a lay understanding of the information at hand. And for both audiences, there are some requirements that are similar, and there are some requirements– in terms of effective communication– there are some requirements that are different. But in the end, we’re still looking to grab attention, hold that attention, come across as knowledgeable, credible, and someone, an organization to whom you want to learn from, and you want to hear more from.

DANIEL PARSCALE: You mentioned that there are a couple of differences between the two audiences and the content that we generate for them. Could I put you on the spot to list a couple of those, even if they’re just high level differences?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Let’s take research. Let’s say we are doing a story or discussing the latest and greatest about smoking and hearing loss. That same information may be aimed at a professional medical audience, and that content may be aimed at separately to a consumer audience.

For that professional audience, we may be getting more into the weeds of medical terminology, the background on some specific science or research and what it means for that practice, in terms of how they’re approaching their patients, or what they may be looking for in terms of prevention, and how audiologists can help that ENT professional, and looking out for certain connections between smoking and, say, hearing loss.

For the consumer, it may be about prevention and really focused more on how they can take better care of their health, if you are smoking, for example. And did you know there are connections between smoking and hearing loss? This is another opportunity for you to look at all the points of your health care and of your overall wellness so that you can be as healthy as possible.

Here are some specific preventive tips. Those preventive tips are not necessarily going to be the tips that are shared with a physician or an audiologist. This is more consumer-oriented. But in the end, we’re still talking with both audiences about connections between smoking and hearing loss.

DANIEL PARSCALE: What goes into your research before you write a piece? Let’s continue with the example you’re using about smoking, for instance. How much time would you dedicate to finding out the different angles for the lay person and the professional?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: You want to start with what the medical journals are saying. What’s the research that’s out there? What are scientists saying? What are they finding? What’s the latest research?

Resources, such as American Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Oregon Health and Science University Medical School Library, even the American Heart Association. I mean, there are good, credible organizations, academic, research-oriented, scientific organizations that are focused on research– the latest and the greatest– and looking at various topics that make a difference for communities. Not esoteric, but focused on what’s affecting local communities across the country.

What are they seeing? What are they finding out? Topics of interest. So you start there. And at the same time, however, you’re also looking at, how are local, and national, and worldwide media digesting the information?

It’s always interesting, when you look at medical journals and the topics that are covered and the way they’re presented, the way the issues are written about. And then to see media digest that information for a consumer audience, you can definitely appreciate the difference in terms of the terminology that’s used. Taking that same information, and using plain English.

Taking out the most salient points, because any research is going to really get into the methodology. And it’s going to talk about the demographics and the various findings and statistics that come out of it. But when you, say, look at how a media outlet has digested this information, they’re going to really take what to their audience is going to be most important, the biggest statistic that affects perhaps their community. And you can see that difference. And you can see the power of distilling information to capture attention.

And we’re doing the same thing. For example, when we are summarizing medical information, insight, science, research, for physician outreach, for example, working with physicians to build a referral relationship, we’re providing summaries of this salient information and using more medical terminology. Still trying to be light on the medical jargon, because you want it to be readable.

No matter who’s reading it– a lay person or professional– you still want it to flow. You still want it to be succinct and clear. So you can not get too far in the weeds of the medical jargon. If folks want that, they can look at the original research.

But when you are summarizing it, you’re still understanding that you only have so much of that person’s time. So you want to make it readable, succinct, and appropriate. But when you then take that, and you make it available for a lay audience, you’re getting even more salient, I would say, in terms of the big statistic that makes the most– that gets the most attention for the consumer audience and what it means for them.

What does this mean for me? For any news, it’s the who, the what, the when, the where, the why, and the so what. Why does this matter?

DANIEL PARSCALE: That sounds like an incredible amount of work, even before you’ve gotten to talking about writing, I mean, the actual copy itself. Just in general, because I’m curious, how long does it take you to actually prepare for that? I mean, we provide this as a service, because it’s so time-consuming. I’m just curious how much time it takes you.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: It takes a robust amount of time, or it can take a robust amount of time, depending on the topic. I mean, we’re talking about medical issues. We’re talking about scientific research that can really get into the weeds.

And so the first thing that you’re doing is you’re making sure you’re getting a handle on this scientific research. What does this mean? The writers may not be medical experts. But they can still, because of their talent and their expertise, take that information, and make it digestible for a lay audience, and provide a salient summary for a professional audience, an expert audience.

So it takes time to look over the information. Make sure you understand what the research is about, what the main points are, because you’re also distilling that information. Like, OK, I’ve read this anywhere from– it could be a two-page scientific report. It could be 16, 20 pages. And, in the end, you’re turning that into a one-page summary, or a blog post, or a headline, or a news release.

You’re turning it into other digestible types of media. So you’ve got to take the time to understand what you’re talking about, because you need to be that credible resource, as well, as you’re digesting that information on behalf of someone else– the person who’s going to read your summary.

Then you’re pulling out those key points. You’re thinking about your various audiences. Am I talking to a lay audience about this? Am I talking to a medical audience?

Also, not only are you looking at that research, but you may be looking at related information that you can tie into it because, again, you’re looking to be a resource. You’re looking to tie in potentially other relevant, salient information that, say, you could turn into additional tips. Putting it into context. And sometimes, to put it into context, you may need additional information.

Let’s go back to the example of smoking and hearing loss. That research might be about the exact effect that smoking may or may not have on hearing loss. And that’s important information. But that study might not talk about how smoking affects people generally, or how hearing loss affects people generally, or what the statistics are regarding hearing loss prevalence across the country or around the world.

So you’re still digging for that other information that allows you to put this research into context for the audience, and that takes time as well. You may want or need to get it vetted by an expert. We have on staff audiologists who can vet our information to make sure that the terminology that we’re using is correct, that it is clear, and that it makes sense for the audience that we’re aiming for. It’s a wonderful in-house service that we have.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Can we talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you run into when you’re trying to find a way to explain these things? And let me give you an example of something like this, or just a for instance, I guess. Because new information is coming out all the time, some of it can sometimes seem contradictory, or it can seem as though there’s two sides of the coin that are both weighted. Or even they’re just reporting, here’s something that we don’t know if it’s true yet. But we’re thinking about it. How do you present that kind of information authoritatively without being misleading?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: First and foremost, I make sure that I am working with credible resources. Just as we need to be a credible resource, and we work hard to be a credible resource and credible source of information, we research, find, and look to credible resources and sources of information.

When you’re looking to professional audiology associations, when you’re looking to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, when you are looking to credible resources, such as the American Medical Association and other well known, credible organizations and agencies that you know that can count on– because they, too, have a lot riding on their credibility and their ability to deliver the most accurate and timely information– you know that you’re in good hands. So that’s something that I, as a writer, pay close attention to.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Do you find that there are any components of a well-written piece that necessarily must be there? Or conversely, let’s look at it from someone who’s not a professional such as yourself. Let’s look at it from their angle. Are there any things that are tossed into writing that you think ought not be used?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: I liken it to a good meal. And–

DANIEL PARSCALE: All beef, no gristle, right?

DANIEL PARSCALE: I mean, maybe it might not be so bad to have a tiny bit of fat because fat adds flavor. And when I say fat, I mean, say for example, let’s say you’re writing a story, and you’re looking at the layout of the story.

And for me as a writer, what’s most important is I need to know the main point of the story. What’s the main point? What’s the focus? What’s the impact on the audience that I’m speaking to?

But it doesn’t mean that I have to lead with that. Sometimes I will. If I really want to take a hard news approach, and my summary lead is getting right to it, right to the point, great. But sometimes I might start with a little bit of flavor.

Maybe I start with a question. Well, we all know that a question is not necessarily going to be the main point of the story, but it’s getting you there. It’s drawing your eye in. It’s getting your attention.

So that’s what I mean by maybe a little bit of the tasty fat. It’s kind of the soft lead in to a story that grabs your attention, and then we get you with the meat.

DANIEL PARSCALE: I imagine that’s really helpful, especially if you’re talking to potential patients. For instance, if you’re talking about, again, smoking comorbidity issues, it’s probably easier to lead in with something more gentle than, smoking is probably going to kill you, or something like that.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Right. You don’t want to lead with, are you still smoking? No. No, that’s not how you want to lead. You want to lead in such a way that’s inspiring, that’s helpful, that’s drawing someone in without being judgmental.

DANIEL PARSCALE: So let’s take a look at some of the content that you’ve written about. We’ve used this, the smoking example, a lot. Can Is it possible to summarize what kind of content is popular?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Comorbidities is pretty popular. Talking about the presence of two chronic diseases or conditions. That’s topical. It gets people’s attention because you’re often talking about diseases and conditions that everyone can relate to, either personally or by way of someone in their family.

For example, when it comes to comorbidities, we may talk about not only smoking and hearing loss. But what about conditions like diabetes, tinnitus, heart disease? So many conditions that have been associated over the years, and with growing research have been associated over the years, with hearing loss.

So these are popular topics and popular inroads to speaking to consumers and also reaching out to physicians and other professionals in the community to build relationships. Everyone can relate to these diseases and conditions.

What do they mean for a hearing loss? Is there a relationship? Why is there a relationship? Wow. I never even knew that.

So then, from the consumer standpoint, the person may be wondering, what does that mean for me? Does that mean that I need to make sure that if I’m doing practicing– if I have this behavior or this condition, that I should also be asking for a hearing check or making sure that I’ve got that on my calendar every year?

Or if I am a physician, should I be thinking about that when I have patients who have diabetes, or who are smoking, or who have heart disease or other conditions that have been associated with hearing loss? Do I need to be talking with them about getting a hearing check or talking with them about symptoms of hearing loss?

DANIEL PARSCALE: So part of the popularity of these pieces is their ubiquity among most people or the familiarity that they have with them to something that’s happening in their lives or with their patients’ lives.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Exactly. It goes back to thinking about the big picture of storytelling when you’re thinking about timeliness. Is this something that’s happening now? Is this something that relates to us now? And impact. How does this affect me? And also proximity. Does it affect the people that I know, that I care about in my community? And relevance. I mean, it kind of hits all of those points.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, let’s talk about how we can translate that relevancy, too, because it’s something you’ve talked about a couple of times but we haven’t really gone into yet, is you’re taking this information and these perspectives and translating them between, as you said, blog posts, white papers, all kinds of different mediums.

Sometimes they’re in print. They’re long, or they’re short. You know what I mean?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Yes.

DANIEL PARSCALE: So what are the challenges that go into taking large concepts and applying them in so many different forms and styles?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: The challenge, and the excitement, and the fun is to make them work for various media. You are writing a piece for a web page. And that’s going to be quite different from a Facebook post.

DANIEL PARSCALE: In what ways?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: When you’re writing for various media, Daniel, you’re thinking about your audience. You’re thinking about the audience and the medium at hand. I mean, there are so many requirements for that audience. Is this a lay audience? Is this a relaxed audience? Is this a very formal audience?

So you’re also thinking about, what is the audience looking for from this? Are they looking for guidance? Are they looking for reinforcement of what they already know? Are they looking to be inspired? Is this a piece that’s about a sense of actuation? We need you to do something, and we need you to do it now.

So there’s that piece of the audience and what we’re looking to accomplish with that audience. But then there’s also the excitement, and the requirements, and the limitations, and the opportunities of the medium. Every medium that you’re working with, whether it’s a blog, the web page, the Facebook post, Twitter, a letter, anything, different requirements, different opportunities, different limitations.

So for the example between, say, the web page and the Facebook post, one of the limitations, one of the differences would be, say, word count. Another is the expectations– the audience expectations on that medium. On Facebook, it’s a little bit more casual. You can’t be too casual, or I suppose you can be, depending on your brand.

And that’s another consideration. What is your brand? Is your brand casual? Does your brand let its hair down a little bit on Facebook? Is that the expectation of your audience?

So you’re taking that same content. And for your web page, you’ve got to think about, is this an educational page? This is strictly a set of tips on this topic. Let’s go for it. And then we’ve got a call to action.

All right, so we’re going to take that same page or that same content. Now we’re looking at Facebook. A, we don’t have as much room. You only have so many characters that you can work with, or and so many characters that you want to work– only so many characters that you want to work with on Facebook. You don’t want to bombard folks with information. So you’re thinking about how I take that great informative information on my web page and make it appropriate for my Facebook audience.

Beyond word count, and beyond the limitations or the opportunities of that specific medium, you’re also looking at the intention of the audience that you’re targeting and how they got to that information that they’re reading, what their expectations are. For example, when you’re looking at the difference between, say, your web page and, let’s say, a social media post, there’s a good chance that if they’re on your web page, that they got there because they did a keyword search on Google.

So they’re looking for hearing aids, or tinnitus, or hearing test, or hearing exam, or hearing loss, but whatever it is that, say, got them to your web page. But if they’re looking at some information that’s, say, on a Facebook post– it’s your Facebook post– it’s likely that information was pushed to them by way of, say, it may be a Facebook ad, or it came up through their feed. And so what you’re looking to do at that point is you’re looking to provide a teaser that draws them in to your web page, your website, your blog.

You need to pull them in to get that information that you want to share with them. So you’re writing for a different medium. It’s a way to repurpose that content. And for that, say, that social media post, it might be a quick question or a statistic that’s real attention grabbing. They’ll want to learn more about this.

Did you know? And then you’re giving this salient statistic that someone could not ignore. And then you pull them in. Want to learn more? Or to learn more– and send them to your website. Having a quick call to action that guarantees they’re going to get some more information, that is targeted to them, that is of interest to them, and that will mean something important to them.

DANIEL PARSCALE: I really like that angle. You mentioned search engines, and that intentionality is one of my biggest focuses when I’m thinking about that for SEO. But I think that the same applies offline as well.

So, for instance, let’s say, something that comes to my mind is you’re promoting an event of some sort. And you are doing that on your website and, let’s say, with a direct mail piece, too, just for fun. Well, if it’s on your website, as you said, someone’s gotten to your website, either due to their previous familiarity with your brand, or they’ve gone looking for you in some way. So you know that they have some interest in your services. And that’s going to provide an opportunity for one tone, knowing that they are interested.

But if you’re using a direct mail approach, that’s maybe a little bit more shotgun method, there’s less reliability that you know what their mindset or their need is. And so you have to present the information usably to them but with a different tone. And I think that’s– it falls in line with what you’ve been saying.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: And when you’re, say, using a mailer, I mean, that also opens up other opportunities. Is it a postcard mailer that’s, as you mentioned, say, like a shotgun approach? Or is it, say, a targeted closed envelope mailer, that’s going to, say, specific folks on your database, patients that you have a direct relationship with? There are other considerations where you want to get them to an event.

Say, if it’s a postcard, one of the considerations is that you’ve got to be succinct. You want to grab their attention. You don’t have a lot of real estate to do it on. You’ve got a postcard that’s front and back. Some of that is reserved for your return address, for the mailing address, the postage. So you’ve got to make a lot with very little space, which is exciting. It really forces you to be clear, to be succinct, to be impactful, to grab attention.

There are also some other considerations. For example, you want to make sure that you are complying with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which deals with, among other things, medical records, patient privacy. So one of the things that you want to make sure that you’re doing if, say, you’re using a postcard, is that you’re not identifying the person as a patient. You want to respect their privacy.

So you’re being creative, and you’re getting their attention. You’re giving them information. You’re sharing information that’s important, but you want to do it in a way that respects their privacy and, at the same time, moves them to take action.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Besides HIPAA, there are occasionally other restrictions that might have to be taken into consideration. For instance, there are regulations about not misidentifying your credentials, is a common one. Or sometimes, even some of the wording that you can use is regionally specific. And I’m thinking things like use of the word “free” in regards to services versus “complimentary” or something like that. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you have to do as a copywriter to maintain those regulations and rules?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: I can talk a little bit about that. There are federal regulations concerning the use of the word “free” or referring to free tests or free evaluations. Providers can offer free tests or free evaluations to– because of Medicare and Medicaid restrictions. So the purpose of that is to avoid influencing someone’s choice of Medicare or Medicaid provider based on whether or not billable services are being offered for free.

So there are some instances you’ve got to be careful of that. Is this a provider that is providing care to people who are using Medicare or Medicaid? Now, if the member or the provider does not bill Medicare, it’s OK to, say, offer free tests and evaluations. But you’ve got to be clear on where that provider stands and what services that they’re offering.

Another thing is advertising something as new. If it’s been on the market for longer than a year, per HIPAA, we can’t advertise that service or product as being new. So those– just things like that, that are important to be– provisions like that, that are important to be aware of, and keeping that in mind when writing, when doing business to consumer communications.

DANIEL PARSCALE: I want to ask one last question for you. I think this is going to be on the minds of most of the people who are ready to write their own content as in addition to the stuff that we’re providing. Where do you come up with your ideas? I know that this is a big one even for us internally.

And seeing all the work that you do, I wonder, how in the world did you ever come up with these ideas, knowing that they’re relevant? I mean, there’s just so much work for this. What would you recommend to someone who wants to write their own content but doesn’t know where to begin?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: The opportunities are endless. Just hearing from your patients for starters. What questions are they asking? What concerns do they have?

There’s that saying that, any one question that you have, you’re representing at least, what, 1,000 other people who have that same question. So you can bet, if one person is asking, lots of other folks want to know the same thing. Lots of consumers, lots of prospects, lots of people, who may not even know about your practice, who want to know the same thing, who would appreciate that educational, helpful information. So starting there is valuable, starting with your patients.

Also looking at news stories. There’s a service from Google, for example, called Google Alerts. And you can set up keywords that you want to hear about, read about every day. You can stay on top of current events, what’s happening locally, regionally, around the world.

And I say around the world because there are smoking, hearing loss, many health conditions, diseases, many are prevalent around the world. There is research that is done not only locally, and regionally, and nationally, but on issues that are affecting people globally. And even when they’re globally, there are ways to localize the information. So staying on top of those current events is so important. And Google Alerts is one way to do that.

Also, most of the time, most practitioners are going to be affiliated with certain professional organizations that are going to have a salient, updated information on their websites, in their newsletters. Sign up for electronic newsletters. Most organizations provide free e-newsletters. All you have to do is provide your name, your company, and your email address. Boom. You’re getting updates every day, or weekly, or however often you’d like to get that information.

And also networking with fellow practitioners. Building those relationships with other practitioners in your field and folks who are not in your field but who are in other disciplines. Because, again, when it comes to comorbidities, for example, that association between hearing loss and other diseases and conditions, those other diseases and conditions, they may not be diseases and conditions that you treat. Yet, when you are networking with other folks who do provide that care, you’re able to connect the dots and see that, wow, this is a topic of interest. These associations, these conditions that are associated that give me and give my colleagues an opportunity to add another issue to the list of preventive care.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well with that, I think we should take a second to step back and review everything that we’ve learned today. So this is the part where I ask you to tell me your top three takeaways. What is the most important information that you would like people to remember from this conversation?

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: Information is almost always repurposable for various needs and audiences. If that information was worth putting together and sharing, then it’s worth repurposing.

The second thing that I would advise is to keep in mind who your audience is. Is it a professional audience? Is it a lay audience, consumer? Think about that when it comes to the information that you’re sharing in terms of the tone, the storytelling style. Are you getting right to the point?

My third point would be to be true to your brand. Regardless of what you’re communicating, or to whom you’re communicating, or in what medium you’re communicating, being true to your brand. Knowing who you are, what your mission is, what you stand for, and what’s unique about you that your audiences can always rely on.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, thank you, Shareefah, for your time and for helping us to really break down a very complex and time-consuming task. I appreciate everything that you’ve taught us today.

SHAREEFAH HOOVER: It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Daniel.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DANIEL PARSCALE: Thank you for listening to Reach. As always, make sure to subscribe to our show via iTunes or Google Play, access full transcripts for every show by visiting attainable.fm/reach, or just say hello by dropping me a line at dan@attainable.fm. We’d also appreciate your feedback on Reach by leaving us a review on iTunes or Google Play. Did you learn something new today? If so, let us know by leaving a review. It’s quick and easy, and it helps us to improve.

2017 Digital Marketing Predictions

By

Garrett Jackson on Reach

On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale speaks with Garrett Jackson, Manager of Digital Services at Audigy. Garrett and Dan look into the future (the near future) to bring you predictions for how digital marketing will change in the coming year.

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DAN PARSCALE: Welcome to Reach, a podcast for audiologists and other hearing care professionals who want to reach more patients and maximize their marketing potential. My name is Dan, and each week I’ll bring you interviews from industry experts who are specialized in marketing to the hearing care industry. Reach is a production of the Attainable Podcast Network. Visit attainable.fm for more information or to access a transcript of each show.

Today on Reach, we’re bringing back Garrett Jackson, our manager of digital services here at Audigy. We’re going to be reviewing his 2016 predictions for digital marketing and then making some new predictions as we look ahead to 2017.

Welcome back to Reach, Garrett.

GARRETT JACKSON: Thanks, Dan. It’s nice to be here again.

DAN PARSCALE: Yeah, it’s good to have you. We are going to do the second edition of year-end predictions or predictions for the coming year. Last year, you also helped me with this conversation and some of our ideas hit, some of them missed. I guess that’s why it’s a prediction.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, I thought I did OK, but thanks for pointing out that I missed some.

DAN PARSCALE: Well, a B isn’t failing.

GARRETT JACKSON: It’s failing to me, Dan.

DAN PARSCALE: Oh. Well, tune in next year to see how Garrett feels about himself with that, too. But last year’s focus, you predicted a real focus on local optimization for websites and the importance of mobile for marketing. And I think that we’ve definitely seen both of those things come to play, not just now but even the continuing into next year. Right?

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Google in all of its updates and changes that it did this year, it was all very focused on local and being able to stand out in the results. The only thing that’s really on the Google search results page now, it’s four spots of ads at the top of the page.

So if I type in any search querying hearing aids in Vancouver, Washington, top spots are going to be taken up by ads. And then directly below that, instead of having the organic listings where it’s giving you lists of websites and links to those pages, it’s now just giving you the local pack which is that section with a map and gives you all of the practice names. So definitely made much more of a prominent position on the page but also just in the way that Google is giving us clues and hints on which direction we should focus our time and our energy.

Content has been very focused and rewarded for being more local and for engaging, things that are happening in the community, ways that you’re engaging with just the area that you’re involved in.

DAN PARSCALE: And the same thing is true for mobile and how important it’s become, too. Google has been saying for months, maybe a couple of years now, that everyone is moving towards mobile. We reflect that data in our reports to our members as well. And more importantly, for SEOs, Google is rewarding people whose websites are really heavily optimized for mobile.

GARRETT JACKSON: I think last time we had talked about a mobile first approach, and you see that coming out in a lot more statements around Google. It’s been interesting this last year, too, they also rolled out a way for you to be able to test your usability of your website on mobile devices and have a specific page for that dedicated. So you can tell that they’re trying to make sure that user experience is as strong as it would be on desktop.

So yes, they are rewarding sites that are strong on mobile for ease of use, for having strong content, for being as usable as if it were on a desktop. So we definitely got that one right. It’s been interesting too, to see just within our own membership and with their practices, how the patients have changed in the devices that they’re using.

For example, last year when I was making predictions, we were hovering around 30% or so on average for our devices, and now we’re kind of getting closer to that 40%. So I think on average we were seeing around low 30s before and now kind of moving up towards closer to 40%. And it’s interesting to see the devices.

I think it’s interesting how many devices my parents use on a regular basis, and they’re moving into the demographic that we’re targeting. Really, they have their iPad, they have their cell phones, they have laptops, they have a desktop computer, and they’re engaging with content on all of these devices at any given time of day. So for us to think that our patients aren’t really using these devices, or no, they’re not really into that. People go where the content is now.

And to see my parents unplug their direct TV after years and years of using a satellite service and now switch over to Netflix, that was an indicator to me that we sometimes are quick to judge what we think our target demographic is doing or what these demographics based on their age are willing to do. And it’s evident that putting our focus on digital is where we’re supposed to be.

DAN PARSCALE: Yeah, also we’re entering a point in audiology where the demographic is about to change, because it’s going to be a whole new generation of people entering that demographic if you’re talking about age as one of the predominant factors. And so with that shift, you’re getting people who are already that much more accustomed to these technological advances and more comfortable making those switches.

GARRETT JACKSON: And I think you see that with the technology, too. I mean everything from like the Bragi device, which was kind of a hot topic this last year. It’s something that’s hearable that’s built for all demographics really that are able to use the device to connect with their phone, for it to be able to give you statistics on your running. It’s basically an audio Fitbit that you’re using. And we’re seeing that kind of adoption rate start younger. I don’t go throughout the day without headphones on. I don’t see most people go throughout the day without an ear bud in their ear.

DAN PARSCALE: You’re even wearing headphones right now for this podcast.

GARRETT JACKSON: I know. That’s shocking, right? But the funny thing about it is that as every group, every generation gets more and more comfortable with these devices we’ve been talking about trying to get rid of that stigma around having a hearing aid, well I mean we’re so used to having devices plugged in. Who’s going to know if it’s a hearable or headphones or a hearing aid soon?

And I think you see that also with hearing aids. People are interested in technology, especially our age group and younger demographics. And if their parents are looking into getting a device, I think you see people a lot more apt to say, hey I’ll take a look at that, too, with you because I’d be curious what kind of specs it has. Is it going to connect to your iPhone, does it do Bluetooth, can we make it sync with your TV?

So there’s assumptions that are being made that these devices are going to do those things. And you see younger people researching this on behalf of their parents. And I think that’s one of the statistics that we’ve recently recognized through all of our sites is that we see a lot of young people visiting our members’ websites, and in a lot of ways we assume it’s because they are looking on behalf of their parents or a family member.

DAN PARSCALE: Yeah, this year we started to look at things from kind of an aggregate viewpoint where we wanted to look not just at how our members websites were performing specifically or individually but also how they performed en mass. And like you’re saying, one of the things that we started to see was this trend of people who weren’t necessarily in the 65 plus age demographic not only connecting with our site or getting to it, I should say, but also converting. Not necessarily to say that any one of those particular age demographics was dominant but a substantial portion of who we’re actually reaching.

And I think that you’re exactly right. My guess is that there’s not suddenly that many more people who are in the let’s say 25 to 34-year-old range who suddenly have hearing loss, although that might be the case, but they’re probably more encouraged to help elderly people in their lives who need assistance or they’re working maybe more as a family unit and it’s just something that they’re getting assistance from.

I think that’s going to be a trend that we’re going to continue to see not just in 2017 but probably forever, that there’s going to be more stratification in these age demographics and our strategies are going to have to adapt to target them as well.

GARRETT JACKSON: Because it is a major investment, you have more people in the family that are involved in that decision and making sure that it’s the right choice. And you have people that are smart in the way of technology to be able to look through those specs and make some decisions. And they’re not going to understand anything like our audiologists understand about the level of dB that it’s able to take in, and right now I’m sure I’m saying everything wrong with how that’s concerning hearing, but they’re not going to know those aspects of it.

But things like the iPhone connectivity, it would be important to me. And so I’m probably going to advocate for my parents to have that same thing. Or I’m going to be frustrated if they get on the iPhone with me and they can’t hear me. I can’t hear them. So those things in connecting with your family members becomes more important. And so it does become part of a family decision to make sure that makes sense.

Now kind of going back to the mobile thing we were talking about earlier, I feel pretty good about the prediction I made last year, and I just kind of want to extend it to this year. Mobile is continually becoming the focus. And although right now we’re not seeing 80% of people visiting the site on mobile devices or tablet devices, and I don’t know if it’s going to necessarily trend completely that direction, but we are seeing shifts there.

But the thing I’m mostly interested in is how much effort Google is putting towards this as well. And one of the things that Google’s rolled out this year is their AMP pages, which is funny because it’s named similarly to our Digital AMP Program. Don’t get those two things confused, but Google rolled out an AMP platform that essentially lets you write really small simplified pages and be able to upload them into Google. And that is a way that they’re able to serve up content faster and quicker to users, particularly mobile users so they can access it really quickly.

And I think that is going to be a shift in the way that we create content on the internet. Whereas before you could fill pages and pages of content on a website and you wanted tons of that there, now it’s going to be much more focused on how can I deliver the right amount of content in the right amount of time for the user that’s on this page. I don’t need someone reading 20 minutes on this page of the site. Can I just deliver them what they’re searching for, answer their question, or meet their intent and be able to deliver that information to them the best way possible.

DAN PARSCALE: All right, so that’s our first real look into 2017. What else do you see in your crystal ball?

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, my crystal ball. Let me stare deeply into it. The other thoughts that I have are really around voice, and I think this has kind of hit the mainstream now. There’s a lot of Google Home and Amazon’s Echo or the Alexa, different devices that are showing up a lot on TV right now and definitely making into hopefully people’s Christmas presents– hint, hint– or stockings.

But I think you’re going to see a big shift here. Already the way that people use cell phones, especially within our demographic, is becoming more voice oriented with the advent of Siri and Cortana, depending on which device you have or just the Google Assistant. The way that you use your phone, you’re going to use your voice, and the way that you search for things with your voice is different from the way that you search for it if you’re using a keyboard.

DAN PARSCALE: So how do you mean?

GARRETT JACKSON: So for example, the other day I was driving home. And instead of putting in my address, which I’m not going to say, which I almost did, so almost caught me. Instead of typing in my address to go home, I said, hey Siri give me directions to get home. Siri pulls it up and then delivers me directly there. So already there is a distinction there, but I’m thinking let’s look at our industry specifically.

So for example, if I needed some replacement batteries for my hearing aids, if I’m on my computer I’m probably going to type in batteries, hearing aid batteries into the Google search. Now if I’m on Siri I might ask, hey Siri, where is the closest place that I can get hearing aid batteries? That’s a much longer query, and the way that they’re going to treat that is going to be different.

And so you’re going to see more specific what we call these long-tail keywords that people are using. And it’s the different types of semantics. So the way that we type it in, the way that we request things is going to look different. It’ll be much more conversational in the way that we do these things as well.

The way that I think this is going to affect search is in a lot of ways. First, if everyone has an Alexa or a Google Home in their house, you get used to asking questions of machines in specific ways. So the more I say, hey Amazon, order me more diapers for my kids or order me more bleach for our wash and I start getting comfortable with asking those questions, it’s going to change the way that I use different devices. I’m going to start assuming that my phone knows how to answer those questions as well. Or if I’m on Google, I might type those things in specifically.

I’m also curious, too, as I watch different people within our demographic that we’re targeting on the way that they use phones. I mean questions that they ask Siri sometimes are things that I would never ask Siri, like hey, Siri what’s the distance from this place to this place and how tall is it? They’re much more specific, and I think that there’s kind of an assumption that if technology can do all these amazing things, they can probably answer any question that I have.

I think that younger users are a little bit more comfortable with what computers can do and what can’t they do. However, the technology is absolutely catching up to the place where all users are using it right now. I know that my son frequently will ask the voice on Siri specific questions and get answers from it. So he’s already learning how to adapt to voice and using that. He can’t read, but he can ask the machine how to get an answer for him.

DAN PARSCALE: That’s interesting. You know, you’re talking about not only the technology adjusting and Google adjusting based off of the way that we’re using these new technologies, but the technology is teaching us to think about new ways to use the old technology, too, which is why we might start typing things differently too. That’s interesting.

GARRETT JACKSON: So when you think about our industry specifically, I like to think about the kinds of questions that people might start asking devices that’s different than what they used to ask. So instead of doing this very simplified versions of hearing aids store or something like that. They might be asking a question like why do my ears feel wet in the morning, which is actually something that we see people searching for when they come to member sites. So by having answers to those questions, we’re able to connect users with that immediately.

And one of the things that’s kind of interesting about this is last year we had talked about some of these features that are coming out and that Google was going to be implementing a lot more of, but at the time, everything from Siri to Google was serving up answers that were a little bit more robotic in the way that they respond. Such as, ask Siri a question, it would pop up and say, here’s some web results that might have an answer for you. Now it’s starting to shift, and I think that’s definitely where you’ve seen a big shift this year.

And I would expect to see even more where through machine learning, these devices are learning how to connect you with very specific answers to those questions. And in so doing, they give you that information before you have to go and search for it any more yourself. They’re serving up those answers for you and actually just conversing with you. If you ask what the results of the recent game was, it’s going to serve up here’s the scores of the two teams. It will know that and will be able to give that to you directly.

DAN PARSCALE: So this could be a double-edged sword for advertisers or anybody who’s got a website, really, because one, you have an opportunity to reformulate your content strategy to be able to be the answer that whichever search engine provides. But also, Google, for instance, is going to try and keep you on Google. It’s not going to say, here’s the link anymore, go ahead and check it out. It’s going to say here’s the link and what it says, and you can read all of that right here, too. So you’re going to have to really be able to entice enough with just that answer to be able to encourage a conversion or a connection.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, and I think that’s a really good point is that delicate dance that we do with Google, which is where you’re really using up their space, but they’re also using our information. So there comes a point where we have to really just make sure that Google is going to be using us as a reference and that we’re gaining clout, credibility, and expertise by supplying them with that answer.

So if someone’s searching for something about a high-frequency hearing loss, we would love for Google to put us at the top of the page to show us as the credible source for that. And that’s really where we’re at right now. And I think you make a good point, which is what is it going to look like in the future? Is Google going to just have an answer that automatically just pulls up for people and just skip us altogether? But it’s funny that you said that, because that’s what steps into one of my other predictions for 2017, which is monetization of Google and advertising.

So Google is a business, shocking.

DAN PARSCALE: You don’t say.

GARRETT JACKSON: I know, right? And we talked about this last time a little bit, but I really just want to emphasize how much it’s changed in this last year, of how much emphasis Google’s putting on the ads that are on the search results page.

So before, we used to have ads along the right-hand side of the page. That’s all been removed now. And now we just have four ads at the top and moved all the rest of the results down lower on the page. And you’re faced with ads, first thing you see when you come to Google, depending on the searches that you make, of course. But there’s already talk about Google adding ads into the local section, and I’m sure that’s just–

DAN PARSCALE: I’ve seen a couple of those, too.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, I’ve seen a couple pop up, so I think what you’re going to continue to see is Google is going to continue to make this shift towards they will supply people with the answers as much as they possibly can. And if they’re going to turn to you to supply them with answers, you have to pay to play, which I think is a fair thing for Google to do because they are a business and they do have the authority that’s out there.

But we also have to consider that in the way that we market. I mean, is it safe for us to just say, well, I have a website. People will find me. I don’t think it’s a safe assumption anymore to think that just having a website is going to be enough. You have to consider how much real estate you are getting from Google, whether that’s through paying for that space on their search engine result page or by being able to supply them with the right answers.

But like we just talked about, Google is going to try and answer as many of these questions as they can on their own. So I think you’re going to see already they’re making a big push to get people to do Ad Words. It’s becoming more and more of a focus of their business to get people engaged in that and to also to use their advertising networks through their Google Display Network where you can show ads on other websites and other places online.

So you know organic will continue to be important and relevant as long as we can make it relevant and important, but I don’t think it’s wise for people to just put all of their eggs in one basket, especially at this point. You’re missing opportunities if you aren’t investing in pay-per-click, if you aren’t taking the time to advertise on these sites. Because at the end of the day, that’s where you’re going to be able to make sure that you have a position and a place on their websites.

DAN PARSCALE: Something that I would point out for this, too. I’ve been following maybe even conspiracy theories about how far that could go, like some people say it’s the end of SEO, because in the next couple of years everything is going to be paid and there’s not going to be such a thing as organic. And I think that’s a little bit far-fetched, but as recently as within the past few weeks, Google has started to remove search keyword volume data from Search Console.

For everyone who’s listening, that’s basically a tool that we use to help determine how often people are searching for things so that we can kind of get an idea for if it’s valuable to our searchers. And to me that signals a shift away from information that we can know readily for free and again toward something that we can bet on better because we’re paying for it.

I think it also points to something that you were saying earlier, which is that search intent needs to be served more than keywords. So I think that you’re right, but my heart tells me that there’s still going to be organic listings there, but it’s going to mean something different. I don’t know. I don’t know.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, trust your heart Dan. I think it’s the right place. I hope that organic continues to be as relevant as it has been in the past, but the other thing I think is important to remember is that Google, although it still seems fairly young as a company, it’s matured and the internet’s changed dramatically from when Google started to where it is now. And it only makes sense for them to be able to pivot and to change.

It’s funny when we have conversations with members, sometimes with other people that I meet, and the concern is well, when can we just be done with digital marketing. When can we just say we’ve done it, like we’ve covered all of our bases. Or how do we know that we’ve arrived or we’ve made it. And part of the fun for digital marketing to me is that we aren’t done. It’s always going to be changing. It’s always going to be evolving. And we have to stay on top of that constantly to make sure that we’re delivering the right tools and we’re delivering the right message in the right places.

However, for a business owner I completely understand how that’s exhausting. You think that you are paying someone to just take care of SEO and it’ll just be done. Well, it’s never done. You’re paying someone to take care of your PPC and that’s never perfect either. You’re always trying to improve things, always trying to make things better and adapting to the way that Google and the search engines are changing the way that they treat users and the way that they guide users to the content they’re looking for.

DAN PARSCALE: Yeah, optimization in search engine optimization is almost a bit of a misleading term, because there is no optimal performance. It’s just your best strategy based off of what you know. And maybe we could even say that in the next couple of years, the search engine part is a misnomer, as well, because we’re turning less into an engine that searches for all of your results and now it’s just an answer machine. It’s closer to artificial intelligence in the way that we imagine it from Star Trek, for instance, than it is to Google or Bing or Dogpile or DuckDuckGo or anything like that.

OK, we’ve been talking about search engines for 2017. Let’s maybe take a sidestep and look at social media a little bit. How is that going to be affected by the coming year?

GARRETT JACKSON: Let’s talk specifically about Facebook. Facebook wants to be the hub of everything that you do. Now we saw this last year when they introduced their Search Knowledge Graph, which is at the top of Facebook. There’s a little search bar. You can type in anything from friends that like Taco Bell to–

DAN PARSCALE: All of them.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah. Yeah that’s exactly right. Friends that live nearby or live in Vancouver or something like that, and it will show you results. They did that to kind of try and connect you more with your friends. But they also did that to start introducing a concept with users which is hey, Facebook actually gives me most of the information I’m looking for.

You also saw this by them adding in the Trending section onto Facebook Desktop and then also onto mobile. If you go to the search bar you can see that, too, where they show you where there’s trending topics. So they tried to kind of cut into Twitter a little bit and say, hey, we can also show you the trending topics that are out there.

But what’s really interesting to me is that once you start using Facebook as your main source of news, or if you start using it as your main source of research, what you do is you don’t realize after you click on a link and you go to maybe an article on the New Yorker or something you’re reading through it, click on another link, you’re still inside of Facebook. And you’re browsing these sites now using basically Facebook as a portal to access all of that.

And I started noticing this more and more as I was using my phone, because you start seeing in the top left corner that it tells you which app you should go back to after you’re done doing this. I realized that so much of what I was doing was staying inside of Facebook. And that’s really their end goal. The more time that they can get you engaged with that, the more time they have to be able to show you advertisers that are relevant to what you’re interested in.

So what I think is going to be kind of a shift this next year, people are already concerned about Facebook and the way that we use it right now where you can essentially create a filter bubble around yourself or an echo chamber where all you hear are opinions that are similar to your own. All you hear are topics that you’re interested in. I know that Facebook is already talking about making changes to be able to allow more customization within the news feed, and I’ll be curious to see how much they do of trying to introduce new ideas into your news feed versus how much they’re going to start giving you more control.

Because it could go one of two ways. They could say, well if you’re upset about how we serve up this content, here you go. Now you can go in and start picking more content you want to see. And you saw that this year. They started allowing you to add people to show up first when you would get on your news feed or make certain topics more important to you.

The thing that’s curious to me and how it affects our members in general is how is this going to affect the advertising aspect on Facebook? Facebook advertising is incredibly detailed in the way that you’re able to really focus on people and get very targeted on exactly the consumer that you’re looking for. The bigger question is how much is this going to impact the organic side of your Facebook page?

If you have a Facebook page that’s not particularly interesting, that’s not engaging, that has no purpose that’s served out there besides just having one, there’s no incentive for Facebook to make sure that that’s in the news feed and there’s no incentive for a user to make sure that it’s inside of their news feed. They might like your page because they’re friends with you or they went to your practice one time, but if they aren’t engaging with that content, there is no hope of it ever making it onto the news feed again.

And I think with the changes that are going to be coming with Facebook this next year, you’re going to see even less hope of your content making it online unless it’s truly getting people to like, share, and comment and engage with the people that like your page.

DAN PARSCALE: Well, so that brings us back to what we were talking about with Google, about the need to pay to really play at an optimal level. Do you think that there’s going to be a shift where we’re going to say, if I have to pay for this, then there’s no benefit outside of that, that all I’m putting out is ads and it kind of removes the fun of social media? Do you think that there’s a chance that it could become less important for maybe small businesses who don’t want their useful content to feel just like advertisements?

GARRETT JACKSON: At a certain point, you have to just recognize that you are advertising. I know in our field specifically, in our industry, we’re working with patients. Obviously we care about making sure that their needs are met and helping them with issues that they’re going through. At the same time, we need to make sure that we’re connecting them with the services and the people that will get them the help that they need.

And I know that over the course that I’ve been with Audigy Group, I’ve talked to members that have had objections to specific ways of advertising or not knowing how to do it in a way that felt like they were still caring for patients but still trying to get them to come and get treated, to get something done. When it comes to Facebook, yeah, you are going to have to pay to play. I think you’re going to be lucky to be able to see more of your content to show up on people’s pages. I think it’s inevitable at this point.

But I also think that the important thing to remember is that you’re not paying to play necessarily, you’re paying to help people and you’re paying to get your message out there. And one thing I’m very confident about is our members here is that we have the best audiologists that are with us here, and they’re doing the best work with patients that we could possibly hope for.

So my goal in doing digital marketing is to make sure that I’m doing everything I can to get those people connected with the patients and the prospective patients that are out there that need the help. So whether you’re paying for that message or you’re just hoping that your organic message will reach them, I think it’s equally important and it’s not any less important if you’re paying for it. If anything, it shows how much you value your patients and your community if you’re willing to put the money towards getting that message out there.

DAN PARSCALE: All right, Garrett. We’ve spent a couple of minutes now looking at the future, what we expect to see in 2017. Why don’t you round that up to us into some nice clean bullet points.

GARRETT JACKSON: So first, we expect to see the demographic shift even more this next year as hearables and newer technology starts hitting the market. So our advice and our prediction is don’t be afraid to embrace newer content, newer devices, and putting that information on your websites because people are searching for it. Even if they’re a younger demographic than you are used to targeting, be prepared for that.

Our second prediction is just as local content has become more important this last year and the organic has been pushed down, ads have been given more of a prominent position, is that you need to be able to pay in order to be on Google. So by using paid search, by paying for Google services, you’re able to make sure your content is located at the top of the page, it’s where people are going to see it most, and it’s prominently available for them to be able to find answers rather than push down to the bottom of the page.

Our third prediction, although you can continue to engage with your patients and people that like your page online with relevant and meaningful content, you also need to start considering social media as another place that you need to be able to pay online to be able to get your content seen and interacted with.

DAN PARSCALE: We’ve rolled the dice. I can’t wait to see how they come up at the end of 2017 when we get to try this again and see how right or wrong we were.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, this is pretty nerve wracking.

DAN PARSCALE: Well thank you again, Garrett. It’s always a pleasure to have you on the show, and I can’t wait to have you again.

GARRETT JACKSON: Thanks so much Dan. It’s been a pleasure.

Grow Your Practice Using Facebook

By

Garrett Jackson on Reach

On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale speaks with Garrett Jackson, Manager of Digital Services at Audigy. Garrett and Dan discuss Facebook and address the elephant in the room — is Facebook really helping me grow my practice?

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DAN PARSCALE: Welcome to Reach, a podcast for audiologists, ENTs, and other hearing care professionals who want to reach more patients and maximize their marketing potential. My name is Dan, and each week I’ll bring you interviews from industry experts who are specialized in marketing to the hearing care industry. Reach is a production of the Attainable Podcast Network. Visit attainable.fm for more information or to access a transcript of each show.

Today on Reach, we have Garrett Jackson, our manager of digital services at Audigy. We’re going to be taking a deep look at Facebook and help you figure out what works and what might get you off track. We’ll also give you some helpful hints on how to make it easy for your practice.

Welcome back to Reach, Garrett. Long time, no see.

GARRETT JACKSON: Thanks, Dan. It’s nice to be here again. I’m sorry I constantly take over the studio. It’s just–

DAN PARSCALE: No, no, no. You’re a VIP of the podcast room here at Audigy.

GARRETT JACKSON: I just really appreciate having a microphone and having a chance to talk. You guys are swell.

DAN PARSCALE: Well, were going to talk today quite a bit about something that I know that as digital marketers we’re passionate about, and we’re going to be kind of aggressive towards Facebook. We’re going to put it on trial.

I know a lot of people assume that Facebook is an absolute must for their digital marketing strategy, and a lot of those same people also hate doing it or they think it’s like simultaneously a waste of their time. They have to do it but it’s not getting them anywhere. We want to put Facebook to task today and kind of figure out which side of those is true or if they’re both true. And this is really sounding serious isn’t it? It’s not like 12 Angry Men, but.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, I’m worried that Mark Zuckerberg is going to listen to this and be like man he’s just not doing me a good favor with this, not really defending it well. But yeah.

DAN PARSCALE: But if you are, Zuck, we want you on the show next week.

GARRETT JACKSON: Oh Yeah. Come on down. Yeah, so let’s just start out with answering that question, because we get that a lot. Just why am I doing this? Is it really important to my business? And is it as dumb as I think it is? And to be fair, based on the number of cat videos I’ve seen on Facebook, yeah it is pretty dumb, not that I don’t like cats. I don’t want to make that claim either.

DAN PARSCALE: The cats thank you.

GARRETT JACKSON: The cats are great. But I do think that you kind of already alluded to this, which is just Facebook can be both good or bad for your business. And I think a lot of it comes down to how comfortable you feel or how comfortable your staff feels about posting on Facebook and understanding what content is worth engaging with and what content’s not. So let’s start first with just talking about why are people on Facebook. Dan why did you join Facebook?

DAN PARSCALE: Well, at the time it was cool, so that’s why I joined. But the thing that really kept me around as the years went on is it became an aggregator for me. I almost forget that I have bookmarks saved in my Chrome anymore, because I don’t go to websites. More often I search through my feed, and it’s an easy way for me to digest a lot of stuff from a lot of different sources. So that’s my primary reason. It’s no longer quite as cool, but hey, I’m in my mid-30s, so that’s my lot in life.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah. Totally. Definitely aggregates all that information. I know for me, I joined because I had just come back from Peru and everyone was using this newfangled thing called Facebook. And all my friends were on it, and they were talking about my wall and how people were going to want to write on my wall. And I realized I was missing out on this conversation that apparently people were having out there. And they were my friends that were on there.

So I got on, connected with my friends, and started building a network and started seeing what they were talking about, what they were posting about, what they were engaging with. And then slowly over time, family members, friends from high school, people I didn’t even know remembered me at all, you start connecting with all these people. And I think that’s the first and foremost thing to remember is that we all started out with Facebook because of the people that we know. We didn’t try and follow businesses or like pages or anything like that from the beginning or at least I know I didn’t. I didn’t really care about following.

DAN PARSCALE: I think in the initial days, there weren’t even business pages. It was just, I mean go far enough back and it was students at a college, right?

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah it’s about networks, it’s about people, and it’s about sharing what you’re interested in with those people. And so the people that you tended to follow were the people that you know and you get along with so their content was interesting to you. It was engaging. And so that’s how they got their users to show up online.

So the guys at Facebook, what their goal is to show how many people are logged into our website. So the easiest way to do that is to start building a huge network. It’s like the greatest multi-level marketing scheme that’s ever happened is getting everyone to add all their friends on Facebook and get everyone to join. And they’re able to say, look we have millions of users. We have 2 million users. We have a billion people on this site now that all turn here to find information from their friends, from their family and engage with what they’re talking about.

So the reason I bring this up is because I think it’s foundational to what you do on Facebook. No one cares that you have a business page. Everyone has a business page. And most of them, I would say 95% of the business pages that are out there are no good. They just aren’t. What they did is they were told to have a Facebook page, they went, they added some photos, they wrote a couple of messages, they told everyone in their network hey, we have a Facebook page. Go and like us on Facebook without understanding why anyone should like them in the first place. And they forgot about what the base, what the foundation of this was.

DAN PARSCALE: Yeah, I agree. When you say that last little bit you were talking about with go and like us on our page. There is a point where I realized that people were using the word like, which colloquially always means enjoy or appreciate or whatever. But they were actually meaning like plus one us, or add to our revenue stream, basically.

But yeah. So along the way people lost the idea that they needed to use this as an outlet to provide something that was useful or engaging or entertaining or something that provided added value to the followers or your potential patients, let’s just say.

So one of the questions that I get asked almost all the time about this is what kind of stuff should I be posting? And I think that that’s a fair question, because it’s obviously the holy grail of questions for Facebook. What do you post to get people engaged? But I think it’s also kind of a misled question, too, because there’s not always going to be like some golden answer to that, right? I mean how do you respond to that question?

GARRETT JACKSON: Before you do anything, before you start talking about what kind of content you should post is what is your goal? And you start there, so my goal on Facebook if I was a business owner would be to create a conversation around whatever goods and services or products I sell.

So in our industry, I want to talk about hearing, and I want to talk about hearing, how it impacts my community, how it impacts my life, how it impacts my patients’ lives and what they can do through hearing to be able to have a better life. So that’s your base message that you’re looking at. So now the question is, now within that spectrum what kind of content is actually going to add value or engage with people? So me maybe posting really interesting studies that I read about and I just post them up on my Facebook page and say, hey everybody there’s this new study that’s out.

Well my audience is 300 likes. I have that many people following me. None of them really care about that data. They don’t care about the new study. But maybe the study implies that there’s a lot of household noises or maybe your lawnmower is particularly loud and can potentially cause damage to your hearing. Now you’ve made that interesting topic of yours applicable to my real life and made me ask you a question about what do I do day to day that might be impacting my hearing? So now you’ve connected yourself like you would have as a friend in saying, hey friend, I know that you’re interested in these things. Here’s something that I know that might be applicable to your interests.

So that’s the kind of gap we have to bridge. If I was on Facebook in the early days, my friends were posting about music that I liked or movies that I liked, and so that was relevant to me. It was meaningful. I knew that they had my best interests at heart. In order to be a relevant page on Facebook or a relevant business, you have to figure out what do your patients care about? What do the people in the community care about?

And maybe you have a very engaged marching band in your town and everyone cares about that marching band. Well, wouldn’t they care if their kids needed to be wearing earplugs during concerts or to think about maybe having the drummer sit a little bit further away from the rest of the band so it’s not deafening and causing damage. So finding ways to connect with people through your topic is the key to any sort of content you develop. So that’s where I would tell everyone to start is think about the community. Think about the people that are following your page and what you can do to connect with their needs, their interests, and their intent.

DAN PARSCALE: One of the things I noticed while you were going through this list of things that could motivate the kind of content you’re putting is you didn’t include lead generation on there. And that makes me wonder what kinds of things, really, what kind of questions do you ask yourself if you want to find out the motivation behind the content that’s going to work for your brand.

GARRETT JACKSON: With Facebook, you’re not necessarily looking to just drive in tons of people that have never heard of you before. That’s not necessarily the place to find that. What you’re trying to do is find ways to be able to make the lives of the people that follow you better and be able to connect them with that content. So if in any way you’re able to give them the tools that they need to enable their lives to be better, to improve it, to fix it, to help them out, that’s what you’re there for and that’s where you start building connections.

That’s where you start building momentum. It’s not in people just searching on Facebook for hearing aid practices and looking at yours and being like I bet they’re interesting. The place where you make the biggest impact is by convincing someone that you are their help, you are their aide, you’re their guide through a specific area, specific interest, and that you can help them through that. As they start to like, comment, and share on what you are giving them, their friends and family see that they are listening to you, that they care about what you’re talking about. And instantly you’re using that relationship that person has with the person that likes your page as a way to build a relationship with someone that’s not there.

So it is lead generation but it’s not in a way where we’re trying to get in front of these people we’ve never talked to you before. What we’re trying to do is build even more trust with the people that know us, breed more familiarity with them. And through those social networks more and more people start to get to know our brand, our presence, and what we stand for.

DAN PARSCALE: So we all start with the content that we’re going to be posting, but it only goes to the people who have liked your page. And I know that some of our members struggle with having very few likes on their page. They think of that as a really big problem and understandably so, too, because there’s obviously a lot of content that gets posted that is never seen by anyone. So you kind of get this worry about like am I just tossing my time and therefore money into the garbage with that? Where I’m going with this is what do you really have to do to get more followers in the first place, and how much of your strategy should be focused on that?

GARRETT JACKSON: When people talk about likes, it just reminds me of high school so much. I mean, especially the business pages. I don’t think people talk about how many friends they have on Facebook. It’s not like, I’ve got 500 friends. You don’t really hear that. Maybe you heard it when it was first coming out. It was kind of a cool thing to have a lot of friends. But I feel like it’s just a cool kid conversation when it comes to likes. Yeah, I only have 500 likes. I see this other guy has 12,000 likes. How do I do that? Like the cool kid example, because in trying to become the cool kid it usually doesn’t work out that way. So by trying–

DAN PARSCALE: Didn’t for me.

GARRETT JACKSON: I know. Me either. I’m speaking from experience here. That cool kid thing never really panned out. But I think you have to identify yourself and be clear on who you are as a presence online. So by trying to get to 12,000 likes, I’ve seen people get to 12,000 likes by telling everyone, hey enter into this contest and like our page. And when you do that, we’ll give you this free thing.

Well how did you build that relationship with them? Was it because of the content that you were sharing with them? Did they find any value in what you were saying? Or did they do that because they thought they would get that $25 gift certificate to Applebee’s? How long do you think they’re going to stick around when they start seeing your content in the news feed? How long do you think they’re going to stick around as far as recommending you to friends and family? That’s not going to happen.

So would it be better to have 12,000 followers that are local businesses that all shared likes with each other in order to boost the number of likes that they had? That doesn’t improve anything. It doesn’t build relationships. The thing that we need to focus on is if you have 50 followers on your Facebook page and those 50 followers love what you’re posting, they like, they comment, and they share. And they write back to you, back and forth, and you respond back to them and you’re engaged with them.

Those 50 people, let’s say they each have 100 friends, you’ve just now got to 5,000 people. That’s how big your reach is and expands bigger and bigger from there. If you have 12,000 people that follow your page and none of them like or engage with that content, and you’re just pushing out the same stuff over and over again, no one engages with that. Your reach is going to be even more limited than what those guys were achieving. So you will see likes grow organically, and it is a good metric to look at long term.

Last year if I was at 50 and I doubled that number in a year, good for you. But as long as those likes are genuine relationships that you’re building and not just things that you’re trying to take advantage of like local businesses that are sharing likes or through necessarily just a contest to try and drive people in.

Contests can be helpful if you do it once, then you build good content that shows them that they need to partner with you, that you need to talk to them. But it’s not a lasting thing. You need to prove yourself, and I think the best way to do that is through those existing friends and family relationships.

DAN PARSCALE: Again pointing out what you didn’t say in there. I think that a lot of the times people are interested in going viral. That’s been the buzzword forever. And as soon as I hear that, I get this like flash in front of my eyes of like cat videos, and I don’t know what else. But you’re not saying that that’s the way to go with things.

GARRETT JACKSON: We all want to go viral, which is something we probably wouldn’t have said 10 years ago. It had a different meaning back then. But when we talk about content just taking off like that, millions of people following and liking it, that’s going to be very rare. And I would say within our membership that’s not something we should be really focused on. If you hit a home run, like great for you. But I think the most important thing is the difference between being viral and being meaningful. If you look at a lot of those pages where people have done something completely viral and gotten a ton of attention, you can see after a few months it starts to decline. And that’s just what happens, because they’re interesting. Whether that dress was blue and black or gold and white, that’s what the colors were right?

DAN PARSCALE: I still never saw them.

GARRETT JACKSON: Well anyways, the dress. Everyone talked about that for a couple of weeks, and then it slowly disappeared. Might have come up in a party here and there, but people lost interest and they moved on. And that’s what viral content is meant to do. It’s supposed to get a ton of hits, and then it’s supposed to disappear afterwards not by their own intent but that’s just the way we work as a society, especially online. But the more important thing is becoming meaningful. I like to think of that guide that you have that’s there, that friend that can point you in the right direction. If you know that there’s a page that’s out there that’s going to give you great advice that’s going to continue to tell you where you should go, what you should do, that becomes an asset to you. And it makes a difference in your life. It becomes indispensable.

So would you rather become a fleeting, amazing, hyperactive moment in time on the internet, or would you rather become something that people can’t live without. And to me as a marketer, I would always pick B. No matter how much attention you would get from what you were doing on the viral front, becoming meaningful in people’s lives in the end is not only going to mean more business for you, but it’s going to breed better goodwill towards your brand, towards what you’re trying to establish and what you’re trying to build as an enterprise.

DAN PARSCALE: You know what’s going through my head right now? This might be a little bit of a stretch, but you know the band OK Go?

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah.

DAN PARSCALE: So I’ve never heard an OK Go album in my life or even really heard one of their songs except for when they release a new music video, which I always watch. And I’m thinking about that. So if you haven’t seen these, by the way, these guys have incredible music videos that almost always go viral because they’re highly intricate and really, really entertaining to watch. Full disclosure. I’m not as excited about their music, but the point being that their product is their music and that’s what they want you to invest in with dollars when you go out and buy their album on iTunes for instance. But the reason that they got my attention is for their music video. So imagine that you transfer that same thing to your brand, now. If you’re selling hearing aids, for instance, but you only get my attention because of you know that I like to look at pictures of pizza toppings, I’m only going to associate you with pizza toppings. And then I’m never going to actually come to you for your real product. Maybe I got a little bit esoteric there, but do you think that correlates?

GARRETT JACKSON: No, I completely agree. I mean, it needs to be relevant. It’s great to look at whatever fad or thing that’s trending right now online and try and copy that or pull that into your practice, but it’s not necessarily going to speak to what you do. One thing that I have seen more or less go viral on our members’ sites, and I can’t even say necessarily viral on their Facebook pages has been content like a child hearing for the first time.

DAN PARSCALE: That’s a great one. GARRETT JACKSON: That is something that people immediately connect with, because the thought of your child not being able to hear your voice and then the look on their faces. I’ve watched a lot of those videos and every time it’s very moving. And you know we’re not trying to capitalize on that. What we want to do is show moments like that, because then what people ask themselves when they see that kind of video is I haven’t been appreciating sound. Have I been listening to that person that’s in my life, my loved one or family member that I haven’t been listening to. Am I neglecting them by not treating my hearing loss? And start asking those questions.

So if the content can apply to the product or the service like you’re saying, I think that if you’re able to find something that is deeply moving, deeply connecting, then it’s perfectly relevant.

DAN PARSCALE: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be unemotional to be appropriate for your brand. And brands don’t have to be unemotional, either. They just have to be on brand, I guess is the best way I can put it, with their emotions.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, and I think that everything from taking a picture at a patient’s recent wedding where they were able to hear or at an event where they were able to play on stage like maybe like a graduation and they did their final solo and like their jazz band and they’re wearing musician monitors or something like that. I mean, tying it into a meaningful moment is what’s going to make a difference. And I also want to be careful, too, because I’m not trying to say it needs to be emotional every single time. It doesn’t need to be. You just need to be able to find a way to make it meaningful for them and be able to find a way to enable them to achieve more than what they were able to do before they encountered you and your brand and your message than they were after.

DAN PARSCALE: All right, Garrett, we are going to go into our lightning round now. And this is something new to the show. You might have heard it on one of the last episodes. We’re going to be giving you some of rapid-fire questions that came from our listeners, and we want you to give them an equally rapid-fire response.

GARRETT JACKSON: All right.

DAN PARSCALE: And it’s going to be super fun.

GARRETT JACKSON: Oh cool. Sounds super fun. Let’s do it.

DAN PARSCALE: Here’s your first one. As far as social media, what type of results should we be hoping for on something like Facebook Ads? I think this is a great way to bring in the fact that you do have to use ads to guarantee exposure.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yes. Facebook, they’re inundated with tons of posts. And so what they have to determine is based on your preferences, the things you read, the things you don’t, the things you save, the things you like, share, comment. Based on those interactions, they’re able to identify what type of content they think you’re going to be most interested in.

So if they see that you’re not really interacting with business pages at all, it’s not very likely that they’re going to serve up a lot of business page content to those people. So they do have to kind of filter through that. And one of the ways to get on top of that or to get your message out is through Facebook Advertising. Now Facebook Ads can take a lot of different forms and can have a lot of different goals and objectives.

So from that question from a Reach listener, I think it’s really important to point out that before you figure out what to expect from a Facebook Ad campaign, you need to figure out what do you want to see from a Facebook campaign. And let me give you some options.

So you could be looking at doing everything from boosting your blog posts. So if you’re really big on having strong blog posts that people love to read, are very interested in and that’s where you want to focus your energy. You can pay through Facebook to have those boosted and basically moved up higher into people’s news feed and shown more frequently. So you have higher exposure. You’re able to reach more people. So that’s one way that you can use Facebook Advertising.

The other way is you can do it through lead generation, which when you pay for those type of Facebook Ads, it will pay to show some content on Facebook’s news feed, on people’s news feed. And when they click on that, it takes them directly to a form to fill out or directly to a place to be able to contact the practice. So that’s another objective. Obviously, what we would like to see are conversions. Or are people making a phone call or submitting a form or asking for an appointment? That would usually take the form of maybe a free hearing screening or something like that.

There’s other areas that you can look at for Facebook Advertising, including Facebook Like Campaigns in order to drive more people to like your page or notice that it’s there. And so first, I would just say first determine what do you want to get out of your Facebook page? And then Facebook Advertising has a number of ways to be able to achieve that.

And one of the things I think is really helpful is that if you are creating this good of content, you want to be able to reach more people. And Facebook Ads lets you do segmentation within the audience, so much more clearly defined than almost any other platform that I’ve seen.

So on Facebook you can do everything from, say, I only want to target people that have recently moved into a home to I want to target people who like these specific topics. Facebook uses all your information. I guess this is a spoiler for those of you that don’t know. But Facebook uses all the things that you post and that you write about and it uses that to sell you stuff, which is how they’re in business.

There’s a number of factors that Facebook can look at for each individual you’re trying to market to, even just down to who you’re friends with and if those friends like your page. That’s a really easy way for you to be able to reach more of your liked fans, their friends, and their family, which is probably your best target market for trying to get attention by reaching them. And Facebook advertising allows you to achieve that and to reach those people more easily.

Our internal paid search team that’s here, they do an incredible job with the Facebook campaigns. Before starting the campaign, they would give you an idea of what our benchmarks are for each particular objective, and then based on that, they would set out a target. So if you set a budget at $1,000 like you’re talking about, they would be able to come back and say what you should be able to anticipate or what they would hope to achieve during the time that you’re on the program.

And, absolutely, we want to make sure that you are meeting those objectives, that you’re meeting those targets, but I think for the purposes of this first I would just focus on what are you trying to achieve with this. I mean, don’t just pay for Facebook Advertising if you don’t have an objective. Do it because you’re ready to start investing time and energy into creating content that’s going to be relevant for people, because that’s how you’re really going to start reaching your community. That’s really how you’re going to reach beyond the existing patients and find a whole group of new patients that are looking for the services but they don’t know where to turn to.

DAN PARSCALE: One thing that I would like to clarify for our listeners but also for myself. We frequently say what are your goals on this show and to our membership, too. What are some examples of goals that you could have? So for instance, we’ve talked about you could have a campaign to get more likes for your Facebook page. I think that makes a lot of sense to people. Maybe another one might be you want to get traffic to a blog post that you just wrote because you know that it’s converting well once people land on your website. What are some other examples of things that might be good goals, short term or long term on Facebook?

GARRETT JACKSON: I would first focus on like a campaign-level type goal. So for the sake of this example, let’s say I’m really into fitting people with in-ear monitors and musician plugs. And that’s something that’s really important to me as a business owner, and I would like to make that more prominent. So there’s your first goal.

And then what you would do is work with your SBU and determine what you want to hit as far as targets, work with your marketing manager to try and figure out how much more attention you want to drive to this, and then you’re able to turn to the tactics. So once you have the business objective aligned, then you take all those tactics and you figure out what is going to be the most effective way to reach people. Is dropping a direct mail to the entire region and telling everyone about musician plugs going to be very targeted? Probably not. I mean, you would definitely hit a lot of people, but I don’t think that everyone is going to be in the market for that.

So what is the best way to reach those people? May you do a Facebook Ad campaign that’s targeted to people that like pages that have to do with amps or music or guitars or something like that. Now you’re starting to narrow your audience down to people that might be more in the mindset or the market or even of the interest of that field that you’re looking at. So through Facebook you’re able to narrow that down.

So you start with a business objective, you look at the tactics, find the easiest way to narrow that down. And I will say, digital marketing is the most effective way to narrow that audience. No matter what you do in print, and print is still relevant, it’s still important. But you can’t narrow that, you can’t tighten that gap to find those specific people and make sure your message matches what people are looking for as well as you can in digital.

And the reason we can in digital is because so many people like to talk about themselves on Facebook and share what they like and what they’re interested in, which is great. It means a world to us as marketers. Doesn’t mean a lot for your privacy, but it does help us be more effective in connecting you with things you might be interested in.

DAN PARSCALE: How much time should I spend posting on Facebook each week?

GARRETT JACKSON: Great question. What I would say is not focus on every week. Instead, what I would do is take one day of the month, take a couple of hours, write out all of your post content for the entire month and then schedule it. So that way you’re taking two hours of the month, you have it all planned out, and you’re good to go.

DAN PARSCALE: Do I need to assign someone to post on my page for me?

GARRETT JACKSON: We recommend that you assign someone in your office to be in charge of it, and I would say find someone who loves social media. If you give it to someone and just tell them to do it, they’re not going to like it. But if you find someone that enjoys being on social media, that’s exactly who you want to have posting on your behalf.

DAN PARSCALE: Garrett, what’s the best way to get likes?

GARRETT JACKSON: Oh Dan. You’re still trying to be the cool kid. The best way to get likes, I would take this offline. Talk to your patients when they’re in the office, especially those that come in frequently. Ask them if they’re on Facebook, and let them know that you have a page that’s a resource to them where you share insights about what’s going on with hearing, useful information for them, and that you would love to be able to share that with them going forward. That’s the easiest way to get likes.

DAN PARSCALE: What are your thoughts on Facebook Live, and is it worth my time?

GARRETT JACKSON: Facebook Live is great, especially if you’re doing events. Anyone that does a consumer education seminar, anyone that wants to explain a simple process that a patient can do on their own, or take some time to explain something specifically about hearing, I think it’s a great way to use time and how do you engage your patients. But seminars are a great way to do it, or even to show a brief clip of your patient appreciation event. It’s a nice way to connect with those people.

DAN PARSCALE: Do be careful, though, if you do that not to have any accidental HIPAA slips by identifying your patients.

GARRETT JACKSON: That’s true.

DAN PARSCALE: All right, Garrett, we’ve reached that point in the show that you’re already familiar with. We’re going to ask you for your top three takeaways on Facebook.

GARRETT JACKSON: Yeah, of course. So first, remember why you joined Facebook in the first place. It wasn’t about businesses. It wasn’t about all those things that are there now, it’s because of the friends and the networks that you have amongst people that you know. So remember when you’re trying to market on Facebook, it’s about engaging those people.

Second, it’s the difference between being meaningful and being viral. Viral is short lived, so don’t try and focus on that. Meaningful is about becoming essential to the people that follow your page.

Third, because there’s so much content on Facebook, the easiest way to be able to get above the rest of the messages that are out there is to use Facebook advertising to cut through the clutter and to stand out.

DAN PARSCALE: All right. I think that with those three tips in hand, our members are going to be masters of Facebook in no time. So thank you again, Garrett, for being on the show. We can’t wait to have you back on again.

GARRETT JACKSON: Thanks so much. I’ve had a great time.

Better Blogging for Hearing Professionals

By

Patti White on Reach

On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale speaks with Patti White, a Content Specialist at Audigy and a recurring guest on the show about blogging. Patti and Dan explore blogging and go into detail on best practices that will help you maximize the benefits of having a blog for your hearing care practice. Near the end, we answer some of the most common questions sent in by listeners and members.

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DAN: Welcome to Reach, a podcast for audiologists, ENTs, and other hearing care professionals who want to reach more patients and maximize their marketing potential. My name is Dan. And each week, I’ll bring you interviews from industry experts who are specialized in marketing to the hearing care industry. Reach is a production of the Attainable Podcast Network. Visit attainable.fm for more information or to access the transcript of each show.

Today on Reach, we’re going to be talking about blogs. If you’ve ever had any questions about whether you should blog, or how to write a blog that’s both useful and sharable, and it won’t drain all of your time away from your business, today’s episode is for you. Joining us today is Patti White, our content specialist at Audigy. Good morning, Patti.

PATTI WHITE: Good morning, Dan.

DAN: How are you doing?

PATTI WHITE: All right. How are you?

DAN: I am great. It’s the holiday season. And I’m stressed. But I’m– everything’s going well.

PATTI WHITE: Well, aren’t we all?

DAN: Oh, Yeah. Well, we’re going to have a fun conversation today, though. And you are the perfect person to talk to about blogging, because you are our content specialist here at Audigy Group. The intention of this is to do two things. We want to be able to inspire people to blog on their own, because we see it as a real opportunity for our members. And then also to give a groundwork for the right way to do this. Because there are best practices, and there are guidelines that I think that every blogger should follow if they want to be successful with their blogging for their business. But they’re easy to miss, especially if you don’t know what to look for.

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely.

DAN: My main point, I think– if I were to sum this up in two sentences– is that a business blog is not like a personal blog or a live journal. And we see that sometimes where people really want to share their emotional story or their personal perspective, but not necessarily their professional perspective.

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely. And there’s nothing wrong with tying in a story. But you do want to be as professional as possible. This is your business we’re talking about. And there’s a lot of things that go into becoming that expert– that go-to resource of information that you don’t want to spoil by sounding unprofessional, or by working in personal details that may or may not be relevant to what you’re talking about.

DAN: Right. If people are reading your blog because you’re the expert, they want to read your expert opinion and not necessarily the the personal details that are associated [INAUDIBLE]

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely. And you have to be cautious, too. Because there’s another side to this, especially since we’re talking about health care. And we’re talking about professionals that work with real people. I mean HIPAA is a real concern. You have to be cautious about what kind of information you’re putting in a blog, if you’re giving a real life example from a patient. So that’s definitely something to consider when you’re writing a blog for your website.

DAN: Right. And obviously because this is business related, the bottom line is going to be– or the question we’re asked anyway, is how is this blog actually going to help generate revenue.

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely.

DAN: So I have a couple of ideas about how that can work. Why do you think that it is revenue generating, or can lead to that?

PATTI WHITE: Well, it does provide a practice with the opportunity to become that go-to resource in their community. These type of blogs, especially when you’re talking about a local private practice, can really portray not just how much they care about what they do but how ingrained they are with their community.

So putting this content together, having it available on your website, and then sharing it via social media or whatever other channel you may choose, can be pretty powerful for a practice to get out there and share their story– and share more information about what they do, why they do it– and even advice on any number of prospects that’s not necessarily about just health care, or just hearing or– yeah, just hearing. It can be about what’s going on in your community and how that ties back into your business, and what you’re doing to participate and to share. And that association can bring people into your door.

DAN: Yeah. You talked about sharing and social there. And I think that’s one of the best ways to– or at least the most common ways to use a blog is to develop something that is– I don’t know– maybe a mini press release– like a little tiny one that you feel like people would be excited to share with their community if they saw it.

Another aspect of this, too, is we’ve talked a lot about being an expert. And you were hinting at this just now, too. If you’re writing a blog about something that people are actively searching for on a search engine, there’s SEO benefits to this as well. So you might be able to target a new kind of client or patient if you write a blog about– well, who knows– a service that you’ve got, or an event that you were with, or something like that. So there’s really multiple different ways that you can use these to draw traffic to your business.

PATTI WHITE: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. I mean taking that step to put yourself in your patient shoes and ask yourself the question what would they want to know. Especially since we just talked about sharing this on social media and that sort of thing. Primarily what you’re going to see on your social platform– any social channel that you’re participating in– is that the people who like your page or are fans of you are either current patients or their friends and family. And this is a good opportunity for you to provide something that they would be interested in. And that’s the audience you’re speaking to.

DAN: So let’s talk about how we speak to these people. I think that one of the frustrating parts about writing a blog is that you want it to be expert level. Which in my mind usually means there’s some amount of depth to it, or it’s concise. Or not concise. What’s the word? Completed, I guess, is the better word. But people don’t always want to read every word. They want to skim things, too. So you have to make sure that it’s easy to digest as well as– you want to take into mind how long people are on your pages in general anyway.

PATTI WHITE: Yeah. And there’s two real levels to this in my opinion. So the first is how you’re actually writing. So we find a lot with our audiologists, and with perfect reason, that they’re using words to describe things that their patients may not necessarily connect with. Where a diagnostic hearing evaluation makes complete sense to an audiologist or to anyone working with the practice, a patient is going to more likely refer to that as a hearing test and not see that there might be a difference between the two.

So speaking and using language that speaks directly to them– I remember going through my public relations courses at Auburn. And they always told us that when you’re writing your material that you need to be writing at more of an eighth grade level. And that’s how newspapers write. Because you have to consider that the audience may or may not be familiar with the terminology you’re using. And you have to make sure you’re explaining that appropriately. So using that language that, like you said, is easily digestible and can be read easily is incredibly important.

But the next level of that is exactly what you said– is how you format that content so that people can digest it– so not just what you write but how it’s presented. So shorter paragraphs– using lists or bullet points to break out topics and to highlight the main level. So what you want to see with a blog is not just the headline. But you want to see a sub headline, and then maybe even subtopics beneath that where I’m going to talk about x point now, and then describe it, discuss it a little bit, and then move on to the next one. So people can easily see and easily skim through your blog to get the main ideas, and then maybe dive deeper to the topic that they’re particularly interested in.

DAN: Yeah. Every time I think about that formatting, I’m reminded of back in grade school or high school when you had those outlines for your report that you would do so that you knew how to word it out. And that is the format. It’s more in-depth than that, obviously. But it looks all like that so it can pass what we call “the five second test.” Can you look at this and know immediately that this is what it’s about, so that you don’t have to read all of it, but you’re driven to read it completely?

PATTI WHITE: And that’s honestly a really good way to start writing a blog as well. So if you have an idea for a topic, break it out into little pieces like that. And then fill in the gaps afterward. So start with what you want to talk about, or maybe the couple of types of topics you want to discuss, or points you want to make within your post, and write beneath that afterward. It might help organize it so it makes it much easier to create.

DAN: And when you put this onto your website in HTML, there’s code for these exact things, too. You’ve got the title, which is obvious. And then you’ve got your headers. And then like you mentioned, you’ve got your bullet point lists, or your numbered lists, or whatever. So if you write it out the way that you’re familiar to from that book report style in grade school, it transfers really naturally to a website anyway. Whether or not you know how to code it, someone can do it for you.

PATTI WHITE: Oh, absolutely. And there’s a lot of other options that you just mentioned to make other things stand out. You can bold certain items. You can underline. You can italicize. You can put into quotes and block quote things to make them stand out more. So there’s a lot of things that can be done once it’s actually put onto your website to make it that much more digestible.

DAN: Pictures are really good for this, too.

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely. Pictures, video, any other multimedia that you could potentially use or work in naturally, it makes sense to include. You want to be careful that the imagery you’re using either belongs to you or was purchased. But anything like that is absolutely wonderful. And it adds that much more interest to your blog.

DAN: So let’s talk a little bit about the specific components that we’re talking about. I’ll put you on the spot. What do you think it takes to write a good headline?

PATTI WHITE: It goes back to what we discussed before. And that’s really putting yourself in the patient’s shoes. What is it that they’re going to be looking for? What question have they asked that they’re trying to find a solution to? So for example, if you’re talking about how hearing and heart health are connected– that co-morbidity– and you want to write something about that. Well, what things might people be searching for that would bring them to this particular topic? I think a good example could potentially be different foods they could eat, or different recipes they could have that help with their hearing health as well as their heart health– discussing more about why it’s important to have good heart health.

There’s a lot of different ways you can format that question and come to it. But you want to dive deeper into your topic. So it’s not enough to just write a blog about hearing and heart health, because that’s a very broad topic. With blog posts, you really want to get specific. And if you find that you have more to talk about, that there’s a lot of things that could be discussed under this topic, maybe consider doing a series of blog posts. But the idea, especially when you’re talking about your headline, is to get to the main point. What might people be searching for in order to get to this content? And that’s really where you’re going to find the best solution– so asking the question in the headline, or providing them with some sort of direct answer.

DAN: So some of the ways that we, internally here at Audigy, determine what people are actually searching for is there’s tools from analytics that can help us to track some of these search queries that people use– lots of different tools that run the gamut of that kind of approach. Another thing, too, that I think often gets overlooked– you were just talking about food. And that’s a tactic that we use in some of our newsletters that we know has been successful and popular. So we can translate that non-digital data into an understanding about what might work in digital also. Since that’s a perfect shareable thing. People love to share recipes [INAUDIBLE]

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely. It’s great content that you can utilize, and especially since people really search for things like that. And it, again– great shareable content for social media. People share recipes and such like that all the time.

DAN: What about calls to action? What’s a good way to do that? Where does it fall in the blog post? Do you need it in every blog post?

PATTI WHITE: I would argue that you don’t need it in every blog post. I think you want a call to action when it naturally fits. If you’re talking about something like hearing and heart health and how those things can be related, it may work naturally to say, if you’re curious about your hearing health, please give us a call, or contact us via our website, or what have you.

Or it could be a soft call to action. Maybe there’s more content on your website that relates to the blog post topic itself. And you can link out to that so that the patient can learn more. Or the prospective patient can learn more about what it is that you provide, the services that you offer. So again, if you’re writing a post that ties directly into some kind of service that you offer, you can always link through to that. And then maybe they take the action at that point. But there doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct “contact us today,” or “submit a form,” “request an appointment” type thing on every single blog. Because it may not be warranted.

It may be that the blog post you’re writing is about something you’re doing in the community. So you’re really involved with a certain charity and you’re working– it’s the holiday season like we said. And you’re working with them. And you want to show to people that you’re really committed to their well-being, and their health, and the community. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a call of action at that point. But you could link out to that charitable organization’s website, or their social media pages, or what have you.

DAN: So let me clarify something you said then. Do you think that you don’t necessarily need to have a call to action or a next step on every blog post? I kind of think that if it makes sense, if the context of the blog post is something that relates to a service or something like that, then it makes sense to. Otherwise you want– I think you called it– maybe it’s like a soft lead into other content for maybe link building purposes.

PATTI WHITE: Yeah. And to be fair, I think that’s definitely a valid point. And what you want to have is not necessarily– and what I meant is not necessarily a direct call to action. You don’t have to have something actionable at the end of a blog post or an article like that. Just because the patient may not be ready to take action. They may just be searching for an answer. And that’s all they need to know at this point.

But it could be something soft– a soft call to action like linking through to another page on your website. Or maybe it’s a simple request to share. Or something as simple without even necessarily having to write it in your blog– but having a share function built into your website’s blog so that they can easily share that material otherwise. And that’s kind of the purpose of blog content to begin with is creating something that is worth being shared. Because if it’s not worth being shared, it’s probably not worth being read either. So you really have to consider how much your patients want to take in this type of information.

So again, just to reiterate what you’re saying, I don’t necessarily think you have to have a direct call to action on every blog post that you do. Based on the content, it may warrant a direct call to action, a direct request for an appointment, or something similar. But it could be that you’re working on something in the community or what have you, and you just want that content to be shared. And you want people to know that this is something you’re doing. And that could be just as effective.

DAN: So this opens up the next, maybe obvious, can of worms about what in the world do you actually write about. Because now we’ve got all these concepts for opportunities where you use a call to action, or you don’t, or you use a picture, or all these things. So maybe what are some of the things that people should write about? Barring all the data that we could use to find out how to write it, what are the general topics?

PATTI WHITE: Before I get into all the general topics, I do want to reiterate– because I think this is incredibly important that whatever topic you end up choosing, you want to be incredibly specific. You don’t want to go into extra detail. And you don’t want to start talking about oranges when you’re talking about apples, right? Unless you’re making a comparison or something like that. But make sure your blog topic is specific.

Because typically when people are going to blogs from organic search, they’re asking a question, or they’re looking for something that’s incredibly specific. So what you want to make sure you’re doing is answering that question fully within your post. And that’s not to say the post has to be short. The topic may warrant it being a little bit longer. But you want to make sure you are staying on topic, and that you are not just discussing the topic but that you have an actual intentional point– that you do come to a conclusion at the end. You want to make sure that you’re answering the question.

DAN: So a page– to reiterate this– it should be about one specific thing.

PATTI WHITE: As much as it can be.

DAN: Right. And the way that I always try to remind people about this, too, is that if Google is looking for the best answer to a question, the best answer is going to be the answer to that question and not about a whole bunch of other things, too. That’s your apples and oranges comparison.

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely. And you don’t want people to have to dig through a really long article about a variety of topics until they find what they were actually looking for. That’s when, as I said before, if you find yourself going through a number of topics, maybe consider a blog post series. So you’re not just having one post, but you have several posts. And they can all link back to each other and– because the information is related, but not necessarily– it doesn’t necessarily have to be on one blog post. Spread it out a little bit.

But as far as topic ideas are concerned, I think the very first and easiest way to get ideas– and we have a member that actually brought this to our attention, and she does it actively in her practice– is when a patient comes in and they start asking questions, they ask a lot of questions. If something comes out that you hear over and over again, or maybe you just recognize as you know what– that’s a really good question. Just write it down on a sticky note. Put it on your desk. And then when you have the time to come back to it. Take that opportunity to write your blogs.

And I know this member in particular, she writes her blogs in bulk. So she’ll just get a bunch of sticky note piles. And once she has enough, she’ll write all of her blogs. And she’ll send them on over to us to put on her website. But that’s a really great way to get those topic ideas. Because that’s the goal of your blog at the end of the day is to answer your patients questions. And what better way to do that than to collect the questions directly from the patient.

DAN: What kind of questions are we talking about just for reference?

PATTI WHITE: So it could be something like, why do my hearing aids squeak, or why do they make that feedback sound. Why do my ears feel wet in the morning? I know we have a member that has that blog on her website. And it gets hits over and over and over. It’s very popular. Something that simple can be a good question. You don’t have to go into a ton of detail. But again, you want it to be specific.

DAN: Especially because people more and more are typing questions verbatim in the way that they would ask their audiologist. Or they’re speaking it into a SIri on their iPhone, or asking Alexa in the [INAUDIBLE] Well, maybe not Alexa. But one day maybe. But yeah, there’s that kind of rhetorical aspect of this that’s really pertinent.

PATTI WHITE: And I think it’s a good way to just get the pulse of what is a concern for your patients and make sure they have a better understanding. And you can always direct them to your blog as a way to find out this type of information so you can become that go-to resource for them.

Another good topic would be community outreach. Are you really involved in the local volunteer program for maybe a homeless shelter or for whatever organization it might be– something you are actively participating in. Or maybe it’s something as simple as supporting the local high school football team. We’ve had members in the past that have gone to some of those sporting events, and they’re handing out just little simple earplugs to bring awareness to their hearing health. Like, hey, you have fun, but you need to take action on this a little bit, too.

But sharing that kind of outreach and what you’re doing in the community, I think, is a great blog post. It’s wonderful content for your social media. And it really shows that you’re invested in the community’s health care. That goodwill in turn could bring patients into your door.

DAN: I think that that’s a good technique also if you want to market yourself to a location that you’re not physically present in, and you’re doing outreach elsewhere. That’s a good way to at least get some location keywords on your website that might help give you a little bit of a boost if someone is searching from those areas, but you don’t have a location in it.

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely. And it may not obviously increase those rankings overall across your website. But it may help them find you when otherwise they wouldn’t have. But that’s definitely a good topic. And like we’ve said before, your blog doesn’t have to just be about health care. It needs to always be professional, but it doesn’t have to be about hearing health care. It can be about– maybe someone in the practice has achieved something incredible.

Again, this can be used as your personal space to issue your own press releases. I mean you want to have them in that friendly voice. You want to establish that voice for your blog. But talking about a provider that was recently awarded some high honor– or maybe you have a new provider coming in, and you want to introduce him to your patient database. This is a great place to write something up about that person and introduce them to the patients in your practice.

DAN: People search for names of staff pretty frequently, too. Especially if you have good standing in the community or your new staff does, that’s a really great way to get some presence there, too.

So one of the things that we’re going to be experimenting with on Reach starting today is taking questions from our listeners and our members. Because we get a lot of questions from them about marketing. We’ve got a selection of them here that are related to blogging. And we’re going to try and go through them in kind of a rapid fire pace with you, PATTI.

PATTI WHITE: Sounds good.

DAN: You ready for our lightning round?

PATTI WHITE: Let’s do it.

DAN: OK. So the first one is, how do I get people to read my blog?

PATTI WHITE: How do you get people to read your blog? There’s a couple of different ways to do this. The first is to share it on social media. That’s a really great way to get it out there and get it in front of your current patients. Another is to make sure that it’s searchable– so people finding it through search results– another good way to make sure people are reading your blog. And then just talk about it in your office. Make sure that your patients are aware that you do have a blog and that they can go check it out for information.

DAN: One other thing that might work for you is if you have a blog that you’re very confident is going to be useful to people, you can use a sponsored post or boost that on Facebook.

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely.

DAN: And that will help to get you outside of your followers.

PATTI WHITE: Yeah– your existing fan base for sure.

DAN: OK. Next question. Is there a difference between a blog and an article, or a permanent page, on your site? And what is the difference?

PATTI WHITE: Blogs tend to be more timely– so in-time bound. So there’s more of a urgency to get it out there in a certain set period of time. It’s related to a topic that’s maybe going on. Articles, or pages, that live on your website should be more service based. Or the resource based part of your site should be focused on evergreen content that doesn’t change very often– consistent tips or that sort of thing.

DAN: So the difference between a page, which is we sell hearing aids and this is all you need to know about hearing aids, versus a blog, which is there’s a new hearing aid technology.

PATTI WHITE: Right. That’s a great example and a great way to put it.

DAN: Should I be concerned about allowing comments on my blog?

PATTI WHITE: If you’re not going to respond back to comments, maybe don’t allow comments. It can be a good way to further the discussion, but it’s not necessary.

DAN: There’s also a big chance of getting spam from that, which can make you look less credible. Take that into consideration. Or if you’re going to test with it, then be aware that you might want to turn them off afterwards.

PATTI WHITE: And if you do have comments enabled, I would definitely have the spam filters enabled. Most websites, and our websites included, do come with permissions. So if it’s flagged as spam, it’s not automatically published. It kind of has to be approved. That way, you keep a lot of that from appearing in the comment section when it’s not really valid.

DAN: When I’m thinking about my blog, can you tell me about how long it should be? What’s long? What’s short? What’s just enough?

PATTI WHITE: It’s less really about the length of the post and more about the content and what it’s really about. So what you want to ensure that you’re doing is that you’re answering your patient’s question. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 400 words or a thousand. As long as it’s answering your patient’s question and you’re being specific enough about the topic, it can be as long as it needs to be to provide that valuable information.

DAN: What are the characteristics of the most effective hearing care blogs?

PATTI WHITE: Do they provide valuable information to the patient? Are they answering the patients’ questions? Any good hearing care blog is going to, at the very least, do that. I think a second point for that would be– are you establishing a unique voice for your practice? Or does it sound like someone else is writing the content and a new person’s doing it over and over again? You want to create that consistent trusted voice. So that when your patients go to your blog, they’re reading something in a way they expect to read it. It’s formatted. It’s familiar. Any good blog, not just hearing care, but any good blog establishes a voice and becomes a consistent, familiar voice to their readers.

DAN: How often should I write and publish a blog?

PATTI WHITE: It depends on what it is that you’re writing about and how often you have content that you want to post. I would say at the very minimum, you want to post at least once a month something unique. You can post as often as you’d like. If you have something unique to say, and you want to write content all the time– posting every week– a couple times a week if you wanted to– absolutely go for it. But at a minimum, you should be trying to post at least once a month.

DAN: All right. We’re going to try and compact all of this great learning into our favorite part of the show, which is the top three takeaways. PATTI, you know the drill. What have you got?

PATTI WHITE: Absolutely. So if I could take away three things from this, the first would be, make sure you’re intentional in what you’re writing about. Be specific. Make sure that it’s answering your patients’ questions so that it can be shared. Being specific and making sure you have shareable content is a huge component of blogging.

The second would be, this doesn’t have to be hard. People put a lot of pressure on themselves on– I’ve got to get this blog out. What do I write about? What do I write about? Make this easier on yourself. Collect those questions from your patients. That’s a great way to start.

The third thing that I would take away from this is that formatting. It goes back to making it easier on yourself. Use that outline format as much as you can to write your blogs. You want to make sure that you have a good headline. You have sub-headlines. You have subtopics– and that you break it into a way that a patient can easily take that information and either skim to find what they’re looking for, or they can easily gather the main topic, the main point of your post. And then they can choose to dive deeper wherever they choose.

DAN: Great information on blogs and blogging from PATTI White. Thanks again. It’s really good to have you back on Reach.

PATTI WHITE: It’s a pleasure to be here, Dan. Thank you.

The Beauty of Landing Pages

By

Amelia Dale

On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale talks with Amelia Dale from Audigy’s Paid Search team about landing pages. What are they? Why are they crucial for your paid search campaigns and how you get started with landing pages is discussed.

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DAN PARSCALE: Welcome to Reach, a podcast for audiologists, ENTs, and other hearing care professionals who want to reach more patients and maximize their marketing potential.

My name is Dan, and each week I’ll bring you interviews from industry experts who are specialized in marketing to the hearing care industry. Reach is a production of the Attainable Podcast Network. Visit attainable.fm for more information or to access a transcript of each show.

Today on Reach, we’re going to talk with Amelia Dale about landing pages. How much thought have you been putting into your first impressions from a PPC campaign? Listen in and learn tips that will help you identify ways to improve your PPC results. OK. How are you doing today, Amelia?

AMELIA DALE: I’m doing fantastic. How are you, Dan?

DAN PARSCALE: I am very good, thank you. We’re going to be talking about landing pages today, and I wonder if you can give us a brief synopsis of what your team’s philosophy is on landing pages, why they’re useful and just how you categorize them usually.

AMELIA DALE: That’s a great question. And for you listeners out there who don’t really know what a landing page is, you think, oh is it like a website? Well it is. It’s kind of like a website. It’s like a mini website. Landing pages are a fantastic way for us, the paid search team, to narrow your patients down into specific calls to action.

So a call to action is something like hearing aids. If someone types in a Google, I’m looking for hearing aids in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you want a landing page to pop up at the top that specifically talks about your practice, the kind of hearing aids you sell, the services you offer associated with hearing aids, and the awesome technology that’s out there. Those landing pages are a great way to get your patients into your practice immediately, rather than have them spending hours searching the internet looking for hearing aids.

Landing pages on our team are a fantastic way to highlight different features in your practice. Let’s say you really want to focus on getting those free hearing screenings, consultations, or tests, you’re running a better hearing event. Landing pages are a great way to just dial your patients in to what they’re actually looking for.

DAN PARSCALE: What are the primary components that go into a landing page that make it different than a standard page on a normal website?

AMELIA DALE: There are a lot of components, actually that go into a landing page, but the number one that we like to focus on is form submission. So there’s going to be a little form box on your landing page that says please write your name as the patient. You know, I would write Amelia Dale. You’d include contact information, cell phone number, email, et cetera, and then what you’re looking for.

So if you’re looking for those hearing aids, you could say, I’ve had hearing aids for 10 years. I’m looking to update my technology. Can I schedule an appointment? Those form submissions are where you convert landing pages from just awesome websites to something that actually drives revenue for your practice.

DAN PARSCALE: Are there any other components that are different? I’m thinking about like comparing it to a home page, for instance, where you would have maybe the initial call to action but you might also have a whole list of other services and things like that. What else is essential on a landing page that might not be present on a home page, for instance?

AMELIA DALE: Something that landing pages really have to have to succeed is a single call to action. Those home pages can get a little busy sometimes. They’re great sources of information for your patients, but sometimes people don’t want to sift through everything. They just want to see one thing, you know about hearing aids or about tinnitus or what else they might be looking for.

So those landing pages really dial in what your services are. Like if you’re offering a free hearing screening, we are definitely going to list the four-step hearing screening process on your landing page. So your patients know what to expect when they come in. They’re going to have an interview, a diagnosis, an exam, and recommendation for technology.

DAN PARSCALE: One of the things that it sounds like to me is that your landing pages that you’re building are really just they’re hyper-specific to the needs of the person who’s landing on them, right?

AMELIA DALE: Absolutely.

DAN PARSCALE: So that’s different from a home page or any other website, because who knows what they were looking for when they landed on a home page. They could have been looking for any of the things that you just mentioned. I would imagine that that’s one of the primary reasons that you would use a landing page for an AdWords campaign for instance.

AMELIA DALE: Definitely. And another great thing about landing pages, thanks for bringing that up Dan, is that when someone types in a search query into Google, a lot of things can pop up. Google’s trying to understand what you’re searching for. They’re looking for relevance in a bunch of websites, landing pages, ads, et cetera. And by having a quality landing page, your page should pop up at the top of people’s search results, which is a great way to drive people to your practice.

DAN PARSCALE: So one of the words that you used is relevance. And when I’m thinking about relevance in let’s say an organic search, then I’m thinking about how good the content is on that page so that it will show up for whatever that person is searching about. But with the landing page, you’re talking about something that is so hyper-specific that it’s only relevant to one kind of query, for instance. So for instance, if it’s about a specific kind of hearing aid, the landing page is going to reflect the keywords that are in that search almost identically, I guess might be the way to put it? Is that accurate?

AMELIA DALE: Definitely. Those home pages on your website are a great way to get a general understanding of what your practice is offering, which is great for patients who are looking for maybe a new provider, a good opportunity to gather more information. But those people who are ready to convert, ready to make appointments, get technology, those landing pages are a great place to dial them in.

DAN PARSCALE: Let’s talk a little bit about the actual content that you’re building out for these pages. Let’s start by looking at a call to action, because we’ve talked about that already. I have in my mind some of the things that have been convincing calls to action, for landing pages I’ve hit personally in the past. How do you determine whether a call to action is really what it should be?

AMELIA DALE: Calls to action are really important to be specific. So you wouldn’t want to just say, get more information. You would want to say, schedule your tinnitus appointment today. That call, that action is dialed in. People wouldn’t get confused about what they’re looking for or what they’re contacting your practice about. And we do a lot of A/B testing with our landing pages. And for people out there who are a little iffy on A/B testing, it basically means, something I like to use to describe it is build your favorite sundae. It has ice cream, it has sprinkles, maybe even like whipped cream and a cherry on top. Oh, but someone else’s favorite sundae, chocolate ice cream, butterscotch syrup, and a bunch of nuts. So they’re both sundaes but they’re both different.

A/B testing is kind of like that, but let’s say your ice cream is the same flavor and maybe you both have sprinkles but one has a cherry on top and one doesn’t. So when we A/B test your landing pages, that’s what we’re doing. We’re building two identical pages but changing one key element and then competing them against each other for a length of time, which is about three to four months, to see how your patients and your community are responding to your planning pages to see which sundae they prefer better.

And so when we go forward, we decide oh you know, the sundae with the cherry on top performed really, really well. So next quarter, we’re going to keep the cherry on top and maybe this time we’re going to add chocolate syrup and see what happens. And from there, we’ll continue to improve your landing pages over the year and then compare and contrast going forward to see what we can do to better convert those pages.

We make two landing pages on the same subject for the same member, for the same location, and we run maybe different images on them or we’ll run different calls to action for the form submissions. So there are a variety of ways that we can improve our calls to action, but those actionable statements I guess you could say, where you say, schedule your appointment, call us today, contact our practice now. Those are the best for getting patients into your front door.

DAN PARSCALE: What kind of imagery tends to go well with this? Or does it really even matter that much? Can I just put a picture of anything on the page, or what’s your thought process?

AMELIA DALE: It really depends on what the landing page is addressing. If we are talking about hearing aids, nine times out of 10 we’re going to put a picture of technology. You know, we’re going to put the AGX9. We’re going to put the AGX7, or whatever we can to help the patients better understand what the page is about.

If it’s about consultations, we usually put an image of a provider talking to a patient or maybe a patient talking to a spouse, thinking about their options that are available to them. But those are a lot of really high-quality images that we cycle through and figure out what works for what region best, because every part of the country is different, every practice is different. And every patient is different. You have to figure out what brings them in, what hooks them.

DAN PARSCALE: So the last qualifier you just tossed out there was that every patient is different. Is there a limitation on how specific you can make this landing page? Like for instance, you can talk about A/B testing for a region, but can you really do A/B testing for a specific patient? Or do you? It is it worthwhile?

AMELIA DALE: We have not found that it’s really been effective to go that specific with the landing pages. I feel like it’s more practice driven. We get a better understanding of the general population, but to get so specific for individual patients, I really feel like that’s where the handoff happens between getting someone to fill out a form submission on the landing page and contact the practice. And from there, the front office staff will better be able to address that specific patient’s needs.

DAN PARSCALE: So if we’re going to be looking at this from the practice level then, are you just kind of A/B testing till you find that sweet spot? Or does the branding of that particular practice play a part in this also?

AMELIA DALE: The branding definitely plays a big part. We in the past have built a lot of landing pages based on high conversion rate. We’ve really specified in our own best practices what works and what doesn’t as far as landing page development goes, but having the brand on the landing page as far as colors and logo and having images of your staff on there, that is so important for getting patients in the front door, because it makes you human. It makes your business human and makes people want to trust you and get to know you and work with you going forward.

DAN PARSCALE: Does it matter if your button is red or green or if you have a certain order to the way that things are laid out on the page? Or are those things that you take into consideration, too, and why are they important if they are?

AMELIA DALE: Absolutely. We have found that if the form is not in the top third of the page, people won’t find it. If a landing page doesn’t load within a certain amount of time, or a website, for instance, people will leave because we like things fast here. Technology has improved a lot in the last 10 years, landing pages included, and those forms really need to be at the top of the page.

Having an image of your provider in the top of the page is also really important. Putting a face to the practice rather than just a name. And having the phone number for your practice actually listed all over the landing page. We usually list it about three to four times, just so there is no miscommunication about how to contact you. It’s very important.

DAN PARSCALE: Something that you just said really interested me. And that was that if the form isn’t in the first third of the page, it’s less likely to be seen, right. So that makes me wonder as an analytics guy, what kinds of metrics are you paying attention to here, and what can you determine when you’re analyzing these? And then what’s the most important stuff to pay attention to there, too?

AMELIA DALE: One of the number one things we look at with our landing pages is actually the clickthrough rate. So it’s if somebody sees our ad for paid search pop up in their search query in Google and they click on the ad and go to the main page, that’s a clickthrough. It means that they saw it. They liked it enough to click on it, and they looked at your information. Maybe they don’t convert just yet. Sometimes the cycle for patients converting can be a little bit longer, maybe a couple of days, a week, a month, depending on what level of service they’re looking for. If they’re buying new technology, usually takes a little longer to convert them.

But another metric we look at when assessing quality landing pages are impressions. Those are just when your ads pop up. How many people have seen them? Because it’s actually really effective if your brand and your message are being projected to your community on a consistent basis and say 30,000 people in your area saw your ad and saw your landing page. That’s a lot of people saying, oh you know I’ve heard of them. Word of mouth gets around. Your branding starts becoming part of the community in that way.

The third metric we look at when we’re assessing the quality of landing pages is conversions. When your patients fill out those forms and they call your practice, want to contact your practice to schedule an appointment, that’s really a way for us to decide if the landing page is successful or not because the more patients you get in your door, the more patients you can help. And that means we’re doing our job better.

DAN PARSCALE: Some of the feedback that we will get from time to time about landing pages is that it doesn’t represent a practice’s brand in the same way as their website does. How would you respond to criticism like that?

AMELIA DALE: Landing pages have their own kind of beauty. They really divide your patients into two groups, the ones that are ready to convert, ready to make appointments, ready to purchase technology, and already know that they have a hearing loss or know that they need help.

And patients that are just getting information, maybe not even for themselves. It’s surprising how many people go through this process for a parent, a sibling, a significant other, anybody, just to get more information. So these landing pages, they’re templated and have been tested to convert, because those patients are ready.

DAN PARSCALE: So let’s consider the conversion funnel and where in their journey people are in terms of really taking action on their hearing. Are you building out landing pages and running ad copy that are for people who are ready to start educating themselves on services and technology as well has people who are ready to make their first appointment, and people who are also ready to make their second or third appointment or how deep into that are you going?

AMELIA DALE: When we construct a paid search campaign, one of the things we do for landing pages is we like to highlight four key areas of your practice. And this can be specific for any member, so give or take a couple of pages depending on what they want to focus on. We always build out an audiologist or provider hearing instrument specialist page to have your patients understand what of people work in the practice that they’ll be meeting and working with and getting care from. Then we build out a tinnitus page. That’s very common. We build a hearing aids page, and we build out a free screening consultation or test page.

Patients that come in looking for more information nine times out of 10 are headed towards hearing aids, because they want to talk about what kind of technology they can get for their lifestyle. If you have a more sedentary lifestyle, maybe you don’t need the highest brand of technology because your favorite things to do are to sit at home and hang out with your grandkids and read books and have a really relaxed life. Or vice versa, if you’re very active and you like going out to a lot of football games and concerts and stuff, you might want a different kind of piece of technology.

People who are looking for information usually also go to the audiologist provider HIS page because they want to get to know, like I said earlier, those people that they are going to be meeting when they come in to your practice.

On the opposite end of the coin, people who are ready to convert, who are like I’m dialed in, they schedule those free hearing screenings and consultations and tests. And they usually know that they have tinnitus or that they need a tinnitus appointment.

Because one of the things we focus on in our ad copy in either what you see on the Google search query or on the landing page itself is, do you have ringing in your ears. And that’s something that people really struggle with. It’s uncomfortable and they need care almost immediately when they decide that there are options out there for them. So they’re more likely to convert directly from that tinnitus page.

DAN PARSCALE: If I’m looking to add landing pages to my web presence, what do I have to do?

AMELIA DALE: That’s a great question. It’s actually pretty simple. You have to be on the page search program, but it’s a really easy program to sign up for. All you need to do is contact your marketing manager or contact our team directly. Our contact person is Eric Kammer, and you can contact him at ekammer@audigy.com, Eric Kammer. Or you can look him up on our website, actually. He’s a pretty great guy.

And what you do is you sign up for a monthly fee with paid search. And it’s whatever you designate. If you decide you want to put $400 a month towards your paid search ads or if you want to put $1,000, it’s up to you. But those landing pages are free. We do not charge you to build more. We do not charge you to A/B test them, and we will constantly be optimizing your campaigns throughout the time you’re on our program.

It’s a fabulous setup, and we can have monthly calls with you, quarterly calls with you, whatever you want so that we can better understand what you want on your site and how we can convert your patients for you.

DAN PARSCALE: OK Amelia, we are at the point in the show where we’re going to wrap things up with our top three takeaways. What are the most important things that people should remember about landing pages?

AMELIA DALE: Number one, landing pages make an average website extraordinary. They allow your patients to access the information they need immediately. Number two, landing pages are a fantastic way for practices to directly address patients who are in a different part of their hearing journey, whether they’re ready to purchase technology and commit to an appointment or just searching for more information either for themselves or for a loved one. The third and final point that you guys should take away from this podcast is to A/B test your landing pages. Even the smallest change can dramatically increase your effectiveness.

DAN PARSCALE: Thank you, Amelia, so much for helping us to understand landing pages. There’s a lot to cover here, and I think we covered a great deal of it in this short period of time. I really appreciate your time.

AMELIA DALE: Thanks for having me, Dan.

DAN PARSCALE: Thank you for listening to Reach. As always, make sure to subscribe to our show via iTunes or Google Play. Access full transcripts for every show by visiting attainable.fm/Reach or just say hello by dropping me a line at Dan@attainable.fm. We’d also appreciate your feedback on Reach by leaving us a review on iTunes or Google Play. Did you learn something new today? If so, let us know by leaving a review. It’s quick and easy, and it helps us to improve.

Yellow Page Advertising and Your Digital Future

By

Gail Williams on Reach

On today’s Reach, Dan Parscale is back to talk all about the Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages? Yes! Many audiology and ENT practices still use the Yellow Pages to advertise their business. The question is — should they? Today’s special guest is Gail Williams, a Senior Media Buyer at Audigy.

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DANIEL PASCALE: Thanks for joining me this morning back on Reach. It’s been several months since we had you on the show as one of our first guests. And we’re happy to have you back here to share some more of your media buying expertise with us.

We’re going to be asking a couple of questions like, where are you in your practice’s business history, and does that include Yellow Pages and traditional directories right now? What does that look like for the future? And if you haven’t started using it, should you even be using that service to begin with.

So we’ve had conversations before about the Yellow Pages, and the question is always, are the Yellow Pages dead? Is it a format and a product that just is on its way out? And I believe the last time that I talked to you, your assessment was, it’s not quite there, but it’s almost there.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Right. There had been a lot of speculation. A lot of marketers say that they wouldn’t go into the Yellow Pages or that the Yellow Pages is a dinosaur, that it’s a dying breed.

And all the indications are that it is on a steep decline. It’s like, I think 5% every year that they’re seeing it decline from 2015, and they’re projecting that through 2020. So what would that be, 20%, 25% within that time, within five years. So that’s quite a decline.

DANIEL PASCALE: So I understand that internally, we are not necessarily pushing for people to engage in Yellow Pages advertising so much, and maybe even trying to get them to pull out if they are doing some steady advertising.

GAIL WILLIAMS: There are a lot of placements that can be pretty expensive monthly. I’ve seen upwards of $1,000 to almost $2,000 a month for printed Yellow Pages advertising. So a lot of that is cost-wise, and then we also look by market to see what the competition looks like in their headings.

And then based on that, whether their strategy should be, or how much of a decrease they should be looking at. But then it also frees up some budget for them. And then they’re able to then use that either in something else that they’re seeing a strong return on, or what we like to also see is an expansion into their digital products.

DANIEL PASCALE: So why do you prefer digital? This is obviously something that I would automatically think too, because digital is my focus in marketing. I would be inclined to allocate budget there. Why would you specifically suggest that as opposed to, I don’t know, investing more in newspaper print or magazine, or billboards, or anything like that?

GAIL WILLIAMS: Well, billboards and magazines, they’re great. But really they’re more of a branding vehicle. Of course TV and radio, they’re more branding also. It’s just, it’s going to take quite a long time to run on those kinds of media to really get any sort of return back on it.

With digital of course, it’s much like with the printed Yellow Pages directory, where someone will go there to find something. It’s not like you’re advertising something and you’re trying to reach out and grab an audience and bring them in. They’re coming to find you, or your products and your services. So, online, it makes a lot more sense to transition when you’re talking about searching, of course, for a reference.

DANIEL PASCALE: So one way that I know that you have described this to me off the recording is that digital search– Google, let’s just say– is kind of the modern equivalent of searching in the Yellow Pages. It’s kind of the next step in that. So if those are related, are there other services that Yellow Pages has opened up or other directories like this have opened up in the digital realm? And do they make sense as part of this developing strategy?

GAIL WILLIAMS: Well, they do. They have offerings now, digital. And they have their, what’s called IYP, Internet Yellow Pages. And the only thing is, is that if you were going to expand and go into that much more, then you’re really promoting their brand. You’re promoting, say, YP.com.

You’re not so much promoting your own website, which would be best– well, for a number of reasons, including your own SEO. It would help with your Google return results and your relevancy. So yeah, they are offering that a lot. But like I say, you have the problem where you can’t make changes very quickly because you really have to get a ticket through them more and it takes a lot longer, the process. You’d be waiting for a while, followup is really complicated.

DANIEL PASCALE: Can I interrupt and ask, what does the IYP service look like? Is it very comparable to a standard Yellow Pages listing, or is it more like a display ad or something altogether different?

GAIL WILLIAMS: Well, it does look like a listing. They sometimes have– well, it depends on how much you want to spend, I guess, because you can have just a basic listing of the name of your business and your phone number, or you can have your website added to the listing for a premium. Or you can pay more and have perhaps like a video added to it or some photos added to it. But they’re always wanting you to pay more of a premium for all of that.

Also, they usually come with an annual agreement. So if you were going to try to run something and see how well it was returning, what the response was, and say four to five months or something, you can’t get out of anything. You’re locked in. You’re locked in for an annual agreement just like you were with the printed Yellow Pages.

DANIEL PASCALE: That’s unusual compared to a lot of other digital advertising, and I don’t know this, but I’m going to guess that it’s a pullover from the way that they do business in print.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Exactly. And they want to get that wrapped up and have it kind of like, rolling for a year so that they don’t really have to make a lot of changes and go in and make a lot of edits. Which is fine from their business standpoint, but from the standpoint of our membership or any business owner, then you want to be able to make changes quickly, to optimize quickly. So yeah, it doesn’t really turn on a dime very well.

DANIEL PASCALE: So I’m getting the sensation that you do not advocate for rolling over traditional print [INAUDIBLE] stuff into their digital services, but into something altogether different then.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Sometimes they’ll make packages, they’ll bundle. They will take their printed products and their digital products and make a package for you. And if you were to say, I don’t want your digital offering, I just want your printed offering and I’m going to do digital elsewhere, then all of a sudden the print rates go way up. And so they do all that bundling so that they can also try to transition into their new products.

DANIEL PASCALE: It sounds like every time Comcast asks me to sign up for a phone line so I can decrease the rate of my cable service.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Exactly right. It’s the same kind of thing.

DANIEL PASCALE: And I don’t need a phone line. If you’re out there, Comcast. So I know that historically, a lot of audiologists have used this.

And to kind of summarize the rationale behind that as I can see it, as a millennial, is that the demographic that is typically using this the most, the Yellow Pages, the big book, is our target demographic, they’re the 65-plus demographic, etc. That’s changing a little bit, but is that still true? Is that still the main demographic that’s using the Yellow Pages?

GAIL WILLIAMS: Absolutely. And of course, it’s going down. They’ve said that since– well, it’s projected, I believe, from 2015 through 2020, it’s expected to go down, usage by at least 5% each year.

So it’s on a decline. In the whole scheme of things, it is a rather steep decline. But it’s still not an overnight decline.

So I would say if someone has been advertising in the Yellow Pages for decades upon decades, then they’re probably pretty dyed-in-the-wool with it for a while. But it is time, of course, for people to start making the transition over to the other place where people search for them. And that’s online.

DANIEL PASCALE: Yeah, I can imagine. As you say, they could be dyed-in-the-wool, and there would be some hesitancy. If it’s not necessarily broken, why fix it, even if there is starting to be a decreasing return rate on that?

So what is it that you think when you see someone who’s still using Yellow Pages, and you’re starting to see these decreasing return rates? What’s the first thing you think of in terms of should they stay with this at all and maybe decrease their ad revenue, or should they move to a different direction altogether? What’s your strategy?

GAIL WILLIAMS: As a media buyer, I think about the time that it takes these business owners, who they aren’t necessarily wanting to do marketing. Some enjoy it, some don’t. But they’re audiologists that we deal with, and they want to help people. They don’t want to spend hours poring over the directory placements and the complicated agreements that they send to them and everything.

But when I see it, what I like to look at first is what size are they? And I want to see the actual directory page. I want to see under the headings of audiologists and under hearing aids and assistive devices in our industry. And I want to look and see what their competition is doing.

I had a member that I had worked with a few years back, who had a full page ad and was the only ad in that heading. And so I was actually very upset, frankly, with the publisher at the time, because it was a total oversell. And so I spoke with this member, and I got them to downsize and over that year, I was able to shave over $16,000 from their marketing spend on Yellow Pages. And so then I recommended of course, for him to take that, since he was comfortable paying that, and take that and leverage it for his online position.

DANIEL PASCALE: So you’re able to use the same amount of budgeting, just you want to allocate it where it’s necessary. You said that this person had no competition with their ad?

GAIL WILLIAMS: Absolutely none.

DANIEL PASCALE: Yeah, that is overkill then, isn’t it?

GAIL WILLIAMS: It really is. And you can look in there and the way that they lay out the Yellow Pages is pretty interesting. They go by size first, whoever’s paying the most and getting the biggest size there at the top of the page. And then if everyone’s the same equal size on the page, then they go by seniority in that size. So if they have three people at about a third of the size an ad, whoever’s been in that size the longest goes at the very top.

So sometimes whenever someone wants to go down in size, then they’re immediately going to go under their competition. And we just have to see, how important is that to them? On one hand. It’s like yeah, you want to be ahead of your competition.

And sometimes I think as a marketer, I think, well, let my competition waste their money. And I don’t care so much if that’s where they want to put their spend, I’m going to also then use the savings that I draw from this. And I’m going to go into another effort and find some more audience over here.

DANIEL PASCALE: So depending on the circumstance of the practice and how they are seeing their ROI with using the Yellow Pages, or their competition’s use of the Yellow Pages, they have to make a decision on what is their best strategy for whether or not they should be in the Yellow Pages? What are the alternatives for them if they decide that they want to reallocate some of their budget?

GAIL WILLIAMS: Well really, I think the best answer to that is definitely online. So many of them, they’ve been so used to using the printed directory that they may feel a little intimidated. It’s like, just stick with what you know, kind of thing. It’s like, it’s easier just to do the renewal. And it’s like, I haven’t really tried the digital, I know I’ve got to get there eventually, but they’re a little intimidated because they’re not really familiar with it yet. We see all the time that there are statistics telling us that the fastest growing users of the internet are seniors.

So with the decline, we can actually deduce. We can actually make that assumption that OK, there’s a decline over here with printed directories where seniors tend to use those. And then we see an increase over here. So we know where that audience is kind of going.

DANIEL PASCALE: Right. Facebook is another situation too, where their largest growing demographic for a few years has been the demographic that was using Yellow Pages so much.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Absolutely, I say it all the time. I use personal reference and I talk about my dad. And my dad does a few things online.

He likes to look at EBay, he checks his email, and he loves Facebook, loves it. So that’s a really good place to go. And it’s fairly affordable to advertise on Facebook. And so that’s a really great way to go.

DANIEL PASCALE: We’ve already compared the traditional Yellow Pages book to digital trends. And I think we’ve made a pretty good case for why you should be at least considering digital as part of your marketing strategy. But one of the things that we know for sure is that the people who are primarily using the traditional Yellow Pages are in our target demographic of 65-plus. So that sounds like a pretty important thing to remember if you are actually advertising in the Yellow Pages. You know that if anyone is going to be reading your listing, they’re very likely to be someone you want to be targeting.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Right. I believe I was looking at some numbers here recently, and I believe that the usage for Yellow Pages for millennials, it was under 2% that had even cracked open a Yellow Pages book within like, a year, I think was the timeline. And it was like, over 70% in 65-plus.

So definitely, and as those in their golden years pass on and as the boomers get up in age, it’s just all going to transition as we see right now with being more online. And so it will definitely transition, I believe in the coming years. But yeah, it definitely depends on depends on your age demographic.

DANIEL PASCALE: Bottom line is, you’re not crazy if you are advertising in Yellow Pages, but the writing has been on the wall for a while that this is not going to continue to be your primary ROI, your primary source of leads for your practice. And it’s happening very quickly, that change.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Yes, yes, relatively quickly. When we say quickly, we’re not talking like an asteroid hitting and killing off dinosaurs. It’s not just going to be an overnight thing. But in the whole scope of marketing, yeah, it’s pretty quickly. And the writing is definitely on the wall, and it has been for some time that a business is very wise to get their digital position in order.

DANIEL PASCALE: So the one thing we haven’t really touched base on too much yet is cost, money.

GAIL WILLIAMS: It always comes back to money.

DANIEL PASCALE: Every day, every day. Let’s look at the bottom line then. So is there really going to be a big financial spend difference between traditional Yellow Pages and a more digital focus? And that doesn’t have to just include what you’re paying for the service. It can also be your ROI. How do they compare to each other?

GAIL WILLIAMS: It depends on market size and how large the placement is. But I’ve had members that have saved a lot, it could be $20,000, it could be $50 a month. But really, to take any sort of savings and put it, say, into digital, it really wouldn’t take that much to actually make a difference.

DANIEL PASCALE: That makes sense. There’s no guarantees in marketing, period, right?

GAIL WILLIAMS: Yeah. Oh, we wish, we wish.

DANIEL PASCALE: But it sounds like the benefits of your opportunities are big enough that you still continue to think that this transition is an important one.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Oh yeah, definitely.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DANIEL PASCALE: OK. Well, this brings us to the part of the show where we try to wrap things up. We are going to put the spotlight on you once again, Gail. You know the drill, what are the top three takeaways from today’s conversation?

GAIL WILLIAMS: First of all, the Yellow Pages still shows signs of life, it’s breathing, but it’s getting very labored. Primarily, the signs of life though, are shown by the 65-plus audience. They still have a senior audience.

Number two, the usage is on a steady decline. So really, the trends are showing that really, a business owner should be thinking about it sooner than later about transitioning their presence out of the printed directory. Which leads me to number three, that there are several digital efforts such as paid search, also known as pay per click, or Facebook ads, which are pay for performance-based. So the business owner only pays when someone actually takes an action or engages with their ads.

DANIEL PASCALE: Sounds great. Three great takeaways here. Thank you again, Gail, for coming on Reach, and it’s been a pleasure having you.

GAIL WILLIAMS: Thank you, it’s been my pleasure.

DANIEL PASCALE: Thank you for listening to Reach. As always, make sure to subscribe to our show via iTunes or Google Play, access full transcripts for every show by visiting Attainable.fm/Reach, or just say hello by dropping me a line at Dan@Attainable.fm. We’d also appreciate your feedback on Reach by leaving us a review on iTunes or Google Play.

Did you learn something new today? If so, let us know by leaving a review. It’s quick and easy and it helps us to improve.

What Audiologists and ENTs need to know about SEO

By

Dan Parscale, Host of Reach

On today’s Reach, William Smith sits in to host a show that will help demystify SEO for audiologists and ENT practices! Today’s guest is Dan Parscale, host of Reach and full-time Search Engine Optimization expert!

Dan talks about the basics of SEO and how you know if you need it for your web site, Audigy’s “white hat” approach to optimization, what to avoid when optimizing your web site and some best practices that you can utilize to make your web site “shine” in search results.

Listen to the Episode Below
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Read Transcript

WILLIAM: So today is kind of interesting because, as you can tell by the voice, I’m not Dan Parscale.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Who am I, then?

WILLIAM: But we do have Dan Parscale with us, and that’s because we’re going to be talking about search engine optimization. And it’s kind of funny, because Dan and I were kind of planning out new shows and looking at last season of Reach. And we realized that we hadn’t really talked too much about SEO. And I think maybe the reason is because Dan’s our expert on SEO, but he’s also the host of the show.

So I’m William, and I kind of usually stay behind the scenes, kind of move the levers, and twist the knobs, and make sure that we have everything recorded. But I do have a little experience in some of these digital marketing things. So I’m going to kind of flip the table here on Dan today. He’s had very little notice–

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yes, wish me luck.

WILLIAM: That there’s been a flip of the table. But we’re going to talk about search engine optimization, because it is something that is super important still, even to this day. And I think that there’s still a lot of questions about what it is, f it’s important, how it works, and what the expectations should be around it. So we’re going to get started just talking about some basics. So when I say SEO to you, was what comes to your mind first?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well the first thing is probably the literal interpretation of that which, is search engine optimization. You said that. And I think of that as a way of making your website kind of shine for whatever keywords you’re really trying to get at. A lot of people would, I think, oversimplify it by saying it’s a process about getting your page number one in Google listings for everything.

But really, you end up in the first place because you’re the best answer to a search query. And this process is basically the way of anticipating those queries and then making your page the best answer for whatever happens to be being asked the most. So it’s probably the first thing that comes to mind. Immediately after that, there comes the ancillary programs and things that you can do in addition to SEO. Things like PPC, for instance, which we also do.

WILLIAM: Which we’ve talked a lot about.

DANIEL PARSCALE: We’ve talked a lot about it. And I think that, in my experience anyway, people tend to confuse the two because they work really well together. And they’re designed to do that. But they’re very, very separate too. So I won’t get too far into that because we have touched on it, but that’s the second thing that comes to mind is how it separate from its partners.

WILLIAM: I’m a small business owner. I’m an audiologist, or an ENT. I have my own practice. How do I know that I even need SEO for my website?

DANIEL PARSCALE: The best way that I think I can answer this actually comes from an article I was reading today, where it was comparing SEO and fitness. So I can say, because I’ve been to the gym once or twice in my life, that I need to go more often. And I know that because I’ve been in better shape in the past, if I continue to optimize my body, then I would be able to be in better shape.

The same thing is with SEO. You might not have to do SEO to be healthy. But if you’re consistent with it, you will almost invariably maintain your optimal health or get closer to that. I don’t think that you should be looking for necessarily the writing on the wall, if that’s what you’re looking for.

WILLIAM: Becuase then it’s probably too late.

DANIEL PARSCALE: I mean, it’s never too late to start, but you might already be deep in the hole. It makes more sense to be doing this, because frankly this is Google’s world and we’re just living it, right? So you have to be able to play their game if you want to rank well.

It wouldn’t make sense to assume that you’re going to rank first for all of your favorite keywords if you’re not doing anything. But you don’t have to look necessarily for a rationale to do this. You should just be thinking of it as maintaining the health and integrity of your web presence.

WILLIAM: I think when we think about Google, we think about this like all knowing kind of– almost like it’s an entity. And I think the way that search is moving right now is like it’s becoming very conversational. You’re using Siri, you’re using– what is it called, Google Assistant, I think?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah, brand new.

WILLIAM: And I saw that they were brand new phone out that the whole basis of it is like you’re talking to it. You’re having a conversation with it. Isn’t Google smart enough just to know what my website’s about? Why do I need to further as you say, make it shine?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, the answer to that is, like most things in SEO, it’s yes and no. So what you’re talking about is sometimes referred to as semantic search. And people will either search by talking or they type things out in a way that they might also say it.

So in the old days, people might have been used to typing, let’s just say the word “hearing aids” into a search. Now, they’re more likely to either say or type, “where is the best hearing aid supplier near me”, or “why do I need hearing aids for my hearing loss”, or something that we’d call it a long tail keyword. Google is increasingly good at understanding what you actually mean with those things. But it does that for every site that’s also trying to advertise the same information. So when you’re optimizing these things, you want to be able to be really granular with the stuff that you’re targeting.

It’s no longer just good to have a great page about everything about hearing aids, because then it’s going to be competing with a page that might be specifically about, why do I need hearing aids to treat my hearing loss? Something that, by comparison, is so much more close to the query that it’s a better match. And so you’re constantly trying to get more perfect to beat out your competition.

So Google does know these things. And it’s learning faster than honestly I think anyone can keep up with. But that means that we have to be learning and adjusting things constantly, too. And researching.

WILLIAM: So you used the word “make it shine”, “make the website shine” for various phrases and trying to anticipate what people are looking for. How do you do that, exactly, because I know that you have a lot of hands-on with our member websites as they are right now. So what kind of things are you talking about when you say, make it shine?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, that depends on what you’re actually trying to do. So with the start of all of our websites, we have a general idea of what we’re trying to target. So because we’re in the hearing care industry, we have a couple of key words that we know are always going to follow this market. Hearing aids, tinnitus, balance, hearing care, things like that, that are going to be pretty much universal.

To really make it shine, what you need to do is some technical work, such as working on the H1 tags and the title tags, meta descriptions, and then also the content. But you also need to do some research on the back end to find out which kinds of keywords, and phrases, and more specifically, the intention of the search, is really driving what people are searching for, so that you can build out on that. So one of the things that I’m starting to work on right now is really taking the concepts that we’ve got built into our templates and expanding them, so that they are more granular.

For instance, we might have a page that’s about, what is a hearing test? And we can build out another page that’s about, let’s say you’re a person searching because you know what a hearing test is, but you don’t know how to set yourself up for one. Those are two really different kinds of clients, and they’re different kinds of searches and intents. So we can look at content that the history of the content, how it’s doing in Google Analytics, search terms that people are using, using Search Console and other tools.

And we can kind of get an idea and pretty much guess and check these things. We test it to see if it’s doing better. And then if it is, then we continue to use that as our best practice.

WILLIAM: Do I need to have a separate page that talks about what a hearing test is, versus a page that talks about scheduling an appointment at my business to get a hearing test? Or could those things be kind of put into the same page? I guess, how much hand-holding do we really need to do in helping Google understand that if I have a page that talks about hearing tests, and there happens to be a phone number on it, or a form, or something like that, I mean can I just do something like that? Do I have to just create a bunch of pages all over my website to match every single case?

DANIEL PARSCALE: I see what you’re saying. Again, it kind of depends. I think that, for the most part, if you are going to be working in a field such as we are, there’s so much technical stuff that can go into the description of any product or service that it probably makes sense to make a separate page for other aspects of that.

The reason being is, again, you need to get granular with this. If you have one page that covers everything that’s covering a hearing test, it’s no longer a page that’s specifically about one kind of question about a hearing test. I don’t know if that makes sense or– is that clear?

WILLIAM: It does. It does.

DANIEL PARSCALE: OK. Yeah, so it’s the difference between if you have one giant thing that answers everything, and several different pieces that answer specific things. Those specific ones are going to be better answers for questions that are about specific questions.

So you can add these things into a larger page that covers a whole bunch of stuff. And actually, that should be part of the strategy, too. Because linking back and forth between these internally provides another SEO strategy that you can really use. And it’s great for small businesses, too, that might not have a whole lot of connections to other websites.

But you can do that in such a way that you’re not overwhelming the user or yourself, too. Speaking of the user too, another angle to look at this. And one of the ways that I look at it because Google looks at it this way is I frequently talk about how Google wants to provide the best answer to a question. And part of that answer isn’t just going to be the content, but it’s going to be the way that the user can absorb the content.

So if the user experience is such that when you land on a page you had to click on two or three other pages to get to the real answer you wanted, then in that case it’s probably not a good idea to build out several pages. On the other hand, it’s also very likely that if you’re interested in one thing and you got the right answer, you might be more likely to click on a subsequent page that tells you something that you hadn’t originally been searching for. So the real trick is to do your best to whittle down the information you have and see how people are navigating your pages, so that you can make those informed decisions. And then you test it.

WILLIAM: So I think what I’m hearing you say is that it’s not only just the content that’s on the page, but it’s also where it is on your website and how people get to it?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah. There’s a big user experience element that goes with this. My official title is CRO specialist, and so we look at conversion rate optimization for similar reasons. But they’re tied together.

People are more likely to engage with certain graphic interfaces. Or they might be less inclined to look at something that’s at the very, very bottom of your page, because it means they have to scroll all the way down and they might lose interest, or something like this, right? Now, while there’s no golden arrow, or silver bullet, or whatever you want to say for this kind of process, putting your content in the right place and marking it the right way with structured data, for instance, is a really good way for Google to know that what you’re doing and that you have the right information there.

WILLIAM: How did you learn about all this stuff? It seems like– it seems pretty complicated. It’s not just what you put on the page, or where you put it on the page, and how people get to it, and what links to it. So how did you get involved in this and learn about it?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, I have to say the caveat is I don’t know everything about this.

WILLIAM: What?

DANIEL PARSCALE: I now, sorry. Don’t tell my boss. But frankly, to my defense on that too, I don’t think many people do, aside from the people at Google who really started this.

There’s a lot of people in this industry who are fortunately very open about sharing their knowledge and their best practices. But almost all of them will share advice that starts off with Google doesn’t say this explicitly, but we think this is the case. And so you kind of just learn from what other people’s successes are.

There’s a lot of, I don’t want to say copying, but you really do have to follow the trends and see how people who are successful are doing things. Because frankly, some of the times they come about those best practices completely by accident, the same way that you do. Now on the other hand, too, there is a certain amount of stuff that Google will come out and say directly. And there’s a lot of great thought leaders in the industry– MOZ is the one that comes to mind for most of us– that really do an excellent job of researching this, not only with their own tools, but also talking to the people in the industry and aggregating all of that information.

For instance, every year they have a list of– it’s like a pie chart that breaks out what are the most important factors for ranking, based off of the input that they got from people in the industry. You kind of use that as your North Star, but just the same as a North Star, it’s not an exact map. It’s just kind of a guiding principle that lets you know what you should be doing.

WILLIAM: How much time does it take to stay current on the trends related to search optimization?

DANIEL PARSCALE: I mean, as much time as you’re willing to give it, really. I spend at least half an hour every day reading through articles on this. And that’s pretty necessary, because things are changing sometimes every day. And it requires a lot of attention to be able to really get down to these small ideas, which can sometimes take months to roll out, or people won’t even discover them. If Google has an algorithm update, like they just had with Penguin, for instance–

WILLIAM: Explain to listeners what you mean by algorithm update.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Oh, sure. So every time that you type something into the box on Google, and you send it out there, and then they come back, it’s going through their algorithm, which I think of as basically a giant equation on a chalkboard. That if it gets this, then it gives you that, kind of thing. And that calculation is way, way beyond, probably you, anyone that I’ve ever met.

WILLIAM: Definitely.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Oh yeah. It’s just crazy. And to make it even crazier, it changes literally all the time.

So we get certain algorithm updates, like Penguin or Panda. Those are names that we gave it rhetorically in the industry so that we can kind of follow them. And Google doesn’t come out and say, most of the time, hey, we just did this big thing. All of your rankings are going to be completely screwed up now.

Usually what happens is people in the industry will start to hear or speak some chatter about this. And they’ll say, oh, I’ve been noticing that this has been happening to my rankings. It seems to be affecting content like this. Or it seems to be affecting pages that are not optimized for mobile, or something like this. That’s how we usually find this stuff out.

So if you’re not reading up on these things, it’s really, really easy to miss them, especially because in our industry we get considerably less traffic than, let’s say– I don’t know, what’s a– than like mcdonalds.com, of something like that

WILLIAM: Or an e-commerce site.

DANIEL PARSCALE: An e-commerce site, yeah. There’s a huge difference in those kinds of things. With the amount of data that we get, it’s also harder to come up with definitive conclusions, because there’s less data to look at. So you really need to put your data together with the data that comes from other sites.

That’s really one of the cool things about this industry, is that, as you say, it’s anecdotal. It’s very organic. And everything kind of works together through the community.

WILLIAM: So you said that the algorithm can and does change frequently. Do you find that there’s cases where we’ll make some updates to a website and then, literally the next day they’re all undone? Or is it kind of a slow change of search rankings? I mean, how volatile is it from your experience, I guess, working with our members in this industry, where one of these updates will come and just kind of clobber everything that you’ve done?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, this is going to sound like a plug, but it’s true. We don’t usually get hit too hard from these changes, because we follow most of the best practices that come up that we already knew about. And we tend to think forward about what is the best solution for the user in the end [INAUDIBLE].

And that’s really what Google is all about. They don’t usually have these algorithm changes so that they can just shake things up. They try and release them as a way to combat people who are using what we would call black hat practices. People who are basically trying to scam the system.

Or they’re trying to do it in such a way that it makes more sense for the way that people are using the internet. So one of the things that people used to do is they would build up lots of fraudulent backlinks. And what I mean by backlinks is it’s a link that goes to your site from some other site that’s on another domain.

And what would happen was people were making these fake sites so they could build out hundreds or thousands of these links, link them back to their main site. And it would look really good to Google, but it was all kind of a ruse. So Google caught on to this, and because they didn’t want to be susceptible to that, and they wanted only really credible links to make sense, they developed an algorithm change that would be able to basically scan these things and penalize people who are trying to game the system.

WILLIAM: For instance, like overnight, a site just got 300 links to it?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah.

WILLIAM: That would raise a little, like a flag somewhere at Google headquarters.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah. And they can also tell based off of the credibility of the site that it’s coming from. If it’s just a brand new site, for instance. Or if it has nothing to do with your site.

It wouldn’t make quite as much sense for a site that sells dog leashes to be linking to a site that was about table construction, for instance. They just aren’t naturally linked. So Google can kind of work on that.

So the point of bringing that up is to say that these things can change overnight. And we don’t usually get pinged for them because we’re doing our best to do white hat. But recently there was a change that I’m still looking into, actually, where something we use called Google Tag Manager– that’s maybe for a different conversation– but we use it and it uses a big set of code that goes into your site to be able to track stuff.

And overnight, when I thought everything was clean, they switched the code into two different snippets, which go into different places. And so in order to make sure that all of our traffic wasn’t going to disappear, I actually had to contact somebody from Google on Twitter to make sure that things weren’t going to fall apart. And he kind of explained to me what was going on. But it could have potentially been something that overnight would have meant we would have had to completely recode all of our sites, because there was no forewarning about it.

WILLIAM: So this isn’t a set it and forget it type thing. You don’t do optimization on your site once and then just call it good.

DANIEL PARSCALE: No, you can’t just set it and forget it. But there are so many things that you have to tend to that it makes sense that, from time to time, you’re going to touch on one aspect of your SEO and then move over to a different aspect of it. And the beauty of this is, if you’re set up properly, over time your website is just going to naturally accrue more credibility and do better.

WILLIAM: You were talking earlier about best practices, and that we kind of stay within certain parameters that Google does share with us. Can you talk about what some of those best practices are, in case there are people out there that maybe want to take their own stab at doing this? Or they just want to understand more about what it is that we’re doing for their website to help it show up and search.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Sure. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff. One of the things that we’ve already talked about was the technical aspects of it. I think this is probably the first thing that most SEOs will think about as elementary, which is working on your title tags and your H1s. And basically, if you’re thinking about your website as a book in a library, you can kind of think of those as chapter designations that really help to tell you in advance what the page is about.

So optimizing those, which means being specific about the content that’s going to be in them. Making sure that your website is mobile responsive is a huge thing and has been for about the past year, at least. I think it’s escalated in the last year.

And basically what that means is, if you have a website, is it going to look good on your laptop well? Or is it going to look good on your iPhone, or whatever you’re using? They have to be adaptable to those kinds of things. And that’s because people are starting to use their mobile devices more than they’re using their laptops.

In accordance with that– this is one of those user experience things that we were talking about earlier– in accordance with that, Google gives precedence to sites that are developed well for that, especially for mobile searches. In fact, as a side caveat, I read just yesterday that they are going to be splitting up their indexes of all the websites into mobile and non-mobile. And they’re going to be giving precedence to the mobile ones, too. So that’s an example of the kinds of things that we pay attention to. All of our new templates are mobile responsive.

You can also work on the backlinking that we talked about. If you have partnerships that are outside of your business, maybe you sponsor a company, maybe you’re part of a chamber of commerce, something like that, you can frequently connect with them to ask them to build backlinks to your website. And by building that network between the two sites, you can see improvements in the credibility of either or both of them, and kind of develop a symbiotic organic credibility network. That was a lot of words for that, but those are some of the best practices that we look at.

And then of course too, content is still king, I think. And developing out good content. And switching around words in the content so that it really matches what people are searching for.

WILLIAM: Is the content just the written words on the site?

DANIEL PARSCALE: No, it doesn’t have to be. You want to make sure that you have rich content, such as pictures and video. And sometimes your content can be– if you don’t know what an alt text is, that’s basically written word attached to an image in the code that tells either blind users or search engines what the picture is. So you can get that kind of contextual information out of an image in the same way that you could out of the actual written word.

In fact, even just having those on your page is a good sign for Google, because people like to see pretty pictures. They like to absorb information in that way. And that’s why you have infographics everywhere, because it’s a really easy way for people to understand stuff. And because it’s easy for them, and they enjoy it, that’s the best answer to their query.

WILLIAM: So what you’ve described in the best practices, making a title that reflects what’s on the page, using the appropriate words, and I definitely want to follow up with you about, how do you find out what the appropriate words are, because I think that’s probably a big portion of this. But it may seem straightforward to me, so why is this such a difficult task that people seem to face, in terms of getting their website to rank.

Is there– we’ll, you’ve already mentioned there’s a bad way to do it, because you’ve mentioned black hat, which for listeners is people that are kind of unscrupulous. They’re doing things to try to intentionally game the system. Whereas where more, you said, white hat. We’re following best practices.

So give me an example of what the wrong way is to optimize a page, let’s say, for hearing aids. Something that’s near and dear to our listeners, but also a good way to do it.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah. so one of the things that comes to mind is if you were to do keyword stuffing. And keyword stuffing is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You take a keyword, hearing aids, and you put it in every place that you can possibly imagine to put it on your page. You can put in the alt text of an image. You can put it 16 times in one sentence on the page. You can put it five times in your title tag. Like just pretty much stuffing the page with that.

Now, this isn’t the way that people talk, and Google can– or think– and so Google can recognize that through their algorithms. When they see that kind of thing, they are going to recognize that it is spammy, and that it’s not the best answer to your query. So they’re going to devalue it. So if you try that approach, you might get a really good ranking for a short period of time. But invariably, it will come back to bite you.

WILLIAM: What’s the consequence for that?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Well, either you won’t show up well for rankings, or you might be completely de-indexed, which basically means that you’re not eligible to be shown for things that you might otherwise rank for. So the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do and you game the system.

WILLIAM: Yeah, exactly.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Now on the other hand, and this gets to something you were touching base on, there’s the good way to do it. And you think about, OK, I want to rank for keyword, hearing aids. Whenever somebody says, I want to rank for a keyword, I think about a couple of different things. And this is the right way to do this, in my opinion.

First, you want to see, are people searching for that kind of keyword? You might even start does it make sense for my industry? Now obviously, hearing aids makes sense for people who sell hearing aids. Are people actually searching for that keyword? Or are they searching for it with something else that’s like, hearing technology?

Or as a pretty egregious example, I always say, hear good device. Obviously– well, it’s obvious to me because I’ve checked– but people aren’t searching for hear good device,

WILLIAM: Or, I can’t hear.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah, yeah. There’s all these different things that could basically mean– that are basically connected to the same person with the same intention. And intention is a word that we’ve used a lot, too so.

The difference between a search for hearing aids and, where can I find the best hearing aids near me is very different. Let’s imagine that you type hearing aids into Google. The difference between searching for hearing aids and where can I find the best hearing aids for me is based in the intention of the user.

Typing in just the term “hearing aids” might get you a Wikipedia entry for the history of where hearing aids came from, how they’ve developed over the years. It might get you an audiologist in the region who can sell you hearing aids. It might also get you a manufacturer who designs these hearing aids and wants to tell you specifically how they built it, the technical aspects of it. All those things would make sense for something like hearing aids if you just type that in.

Now, if you typed in something that was, what we would say, further down the funnel, meaning closer to buying something, such as, where can I find the best hearing aids for me, that is a completely different user intent. The person who searches for something like that isn’t looking for the complete history of where hearing aids were developed, or why they were developed. They are looking specifically to find the location where they can spend their money and buy a hearing aid without going too far. And they want the best product.

So you have to take those kinds of things into account. Use one of several tools that are on the internet to help you get an idea of what the best phrasing for that is. And then build out your content based off of that. You asked earlier about whether you needed multiple pages to describe the same thing.

And this to me is the reason behind that. Because you want to be able to talk about the same topic, hearing aids, but you have to be able to do it in several different ways. Because you’re going to have patients and clients who are interested in your product from very different mindsets. So that, to me, is not only the white hat, but it’s the smart, strategic way to think about these kinds of things.

WILLIAM: You mentioned that you want to pick the terms that people are actually using when they’re doing searches. Because obviously, optimizing your page for something that people don’t look at, or in the case of something that’s really broad, like, just hearing aid, that could mean anything. And I want to get back to the Wikipedia stuff, because I want to know, well, why does Wikipedia show up for pretty much every search? But we can get to that later.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Sure.

WILLIAM: But what are the right words? Or at least maybe if you can’t tell us what the right words are, what are the steps you go through to determine what words people are using and how are they phrasing it? Because you mentioned, I want to hear better.

You know, I don’t hear very good. The way that people think, or maybe they talk conversationally. How do you find those phrases?

DANIEL PARSCALE: We have access to a whole bunch of tools. Some of them are free, and others aren’t. One of the ones that I like to use a lot is Google Search Console. This is kind of an ancillary to Google Analytics. And one of the tools that you can use with this is, it’ll give you a report on some of the queries that people are using to find your site. Not all of them, because there’s security issues that Google is very strict about.

But you can get enough from them that you can get an idea of what people are finding your site from. It gives you information such as the query, the page that you landed on, how many times there were impressions, where you ranked on average. Things like these that can really get you an idea for, not only what popular interest is in your website, but also how well you’re doing and how well you’re prepared for those kinds of things.

We can use that information, and through several different methods, you can basically figure out where you want to spend your time and efforts right now. What’s the lowest hanging fruit, for instance? And build out and tweak your content from there.

Another thing that you can do– I mentioned Google Analytics a second ago– is look at one of the reports in Google Analytics, which basically will show you the landing pages. Or if you’re talking about organic search which we are, the page that is the first page they saw when they clicked through onto your website.

More frequently than not, that’s going to be your homepage, but it might also be something about a specific topic. Let’s say that it’s about tinnitus again. If you see that tinnitus is ranking way better for landing page hits than another page, that could tell you a couple things, just like with Search Console. People are interested in it and they’re finding your site. So that might also be a clue that would tell you, let’s build out more content about this, and try and reach more people, because they’re clearly interested in this.

It might also tell you that you need to work out some of the content on your pages that isn’t doing so well. But there’s nuances in being able to really assess those data points, to be able to figure that out.

WILLIAM: So Google Analytics will show you how people get to your website, even if it’s not optimized for these phrases. But that could give you, like you mentioned, tinnitus . Like let’s say I have a website, it’s ranking for tinnitus because I see there’s traffic coming in, and people are finding my tinnitus page. Does it also show you kind of where you show up in the results for that, because I would imagine if you haven’t done optimization before, let’s say you have a page on tinnitus.

You might rank for it, but you may not rank very well for it. Would that give you an indication of where you should spend your time? Like, hey, we’re ranking for tinnitus, but we’re maybe on page four for it?

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah, there’s– again, it’s kind of nuanced with that. So you can get a little bit of that information from a Google Search Console. But you always have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt, for the same reason that we usually don’t encourage people to Google for their own brand name. Because every searcher’s experience is going to be different because of so many different factors.

Where they’re searching from, what they searched for before, things like that are going to really affect where they fall now, you can kind of get an idea for the average of where these are, and yes, that’s usually where I would start. If I see that we’re ranking on average for something just at the top of the second page, that’s usually where I want to focus on, because I know it takes a lot less effort, and you get much better results from moving from the second page to the first page than if you were ranking on the fourth page and trying to get to the first. That’s going to take a lot more work, time, energy. So you can, but it’s going to take a little bit of thinking and tinkering around, too.

WILLIAM: Well, thankfully we have you and the team to do the thinking for us.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Oh yeah. We think real– real good, thanks.

WILLIAM: I’m curious, because you mentioned about the amount of effort to move search rankings around, and that kind of leads me to this question that I had. It was like, well, how long does this process usually take? I mean, I think we’ve established it’s ongoing.

But let’s say I have a brand new website. Maybe I just started working with Audigy. We built the website. How long does it take for that website to start ranking to where you can make informed decisions about, OK, this page needs work. Or, we’re good in this one.

Like what does this process look like? Does it take six months? Does it take a year? Does it take six days?

DANIEL PARSCALE: It depends on a couple of things. One, are you near a lot of competition that’s also doing a really good job of SEO? And if that’s the case, then you’re going to have to kind of break through that. And that will take a lot of time.

Usually, I say that you should be looking for the results you’re looking for anywhere from six to nine months, which sounds like a lot of time. But that’s also picking up steadily up until that point. There’s too many factors to really promise you any sort of timeline or result. And as a caveat to that, any SEO who guarantees you any sort of result is not going to be using white hat practices, or they’re just flat out lying, because there are no guarantees.

But you can follow these best practices. And over time, you will start to see these improved results. I would give it at least a few months, though, before I’d really start to be concerned about anything.

WILLIAM: So even though it might take six, nine months, it’s not like at the end of nine months, that’s when you start seeing some traffic to your website. You’ll see it throughout, it just– in order to kind of move you up into above your competition. It could take that long.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah, I think of it more as growing pains. And the fact of the matter is that there are some websites that other websites just can’t compete with. So for instance, we mentioned Wikipedia earlier. You’re never going to beat Wikipedia for the Wikipedia entry on hearing aids. If that’s the keyword you’re trying to rank for, just as an example.

And there are several different reasons for that, but the biggest one is that Wikipedia is enormous and widely trusted in pretty much every category. That’s a definite David and Goliath kind of situation. Now, what you can promise though is that, the more work you do on these pages, over time you will start to do better than you were before.

The main goal for me is to get as many pages on the first page of search results as possible. It’s not even always necessarily to get them into the first place, although that’s what everybody thinks that they want, and understandably so. But really what you want is not– your end game is not to get into the first position, your end game is to get people onto your site who are going to make those conversions. And the better strategy than just trying to be absolutely number one for everything is to try and be the right answer for as much as you are servicing.

WILLIAM: Yeah, because I think we’ve talked before, it comes to mind the last podcast that we did with Megyn Kelly, that you can use PPC. You can pay for placement. Essentially, you can leapfrog everybody if you have enough money. And you could be number one. But I think that the golden goose, I guess, if I was going to use a phrase like that, would be to get a first page ranking where you’re getting a lot of traffic that you don’t have to pay for any of it.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Exactly. Now, the way that things go– is something that I think is pretty interesting, is that, depending on the search intent, you’re going to see more or less paid results in your results page, too. That’s Google being very clever and understanding that the keywords that are related to people who are ready to make a purchase are more valuable for obvious reasons.

And so they can charge more for them and get more advertising on there. So it really is going to be kind of a duality between your paid and your non-paid optimization and practices. But, as you said, the object of the game is to just make sure that you’re the most likely to be seen everywhere. So that’s one of the reasons that we always encourage, if it’s in your budget, to pair PPC with SEO.

WILLIAM: So I’ve personally witnessed you make other people squirm during what’s coming next, which is the top three takeaways for our listeners.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Not the talent competition?

WILLIAM: Not the talent competition. It’s the three points that we want everyone to kind of leave this conversation with. So give me your top three takeaways for SEO.

DANIEL PARSCALE: The first one I’m going to remind everybody is that SEO really is a lot like fitness, just like that article I referenced. If you want to be in your optimal health, you want to work on it year around. You might not get sick if you don’t do it for a while, but you’re never going to be your best unless you’re constantly working towards that goal.

Second one, I would say, is make sure that you are developing a good strategy based off of what people are actually searching for. Don’t use vanity keywords, which are ones that you just want to rant for because you think that the sound nice or you think it might do well for you. Really do your research.

Supply information to your SEO specialist. Let them know where your money is coming from, and then target that. There’s great tools out there so that you can really figure out how to do that properly. And that is the foundation of every well run SEO campaign.

And last, but definitely not least, is, remember that even though content is king, we’re not just talking about keywords here. We’re also talking about user intent. And what I mean by that is you want to make sure that, if somebody is searching for hearing aids, are they trying to find out about the history of the hearing aids, or are they trying to find out where they can buy them?

Ger really inside your patients’ heads. And figure out what it is that they want, and then develop content based around that. And you’re going to be able to get a lot more granular and get the right kind of traffic.

WILLIAM: Well, thank you, Dan, for all of the insights on SEO, and letting me sit-in here and ask you the questions, for once. I appreciate it. And thanks for your time. And this was a great conversation.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Yeah, I had a lot of fun. I hope I can be in this seat again sometime.

WILLIAM: You probably will.

DANIEL PARSCALE: Oh boy. Thanks everyone for listening, too. Thank you for listening to Reach.