We’ve all lived through an amazing amount of change in 2020. Yay us! The pace of change is only likely to continue to escalate, and that applies to your online marketing tactics and strategies too. Let’s dust off the crystal ball and talk a bit about how the marketing landscape will change and how we’re going to be shifting effort for our clients in 2021.
More Interactive Content
People like pretty pictures. But you know what they like even better? Videos, and lots of ‘em. Online video viewership is expected to rise another 8% by 2022 to almost 250 million viewers in the US alone. Nearly 50% of people watch an hour or more of video on YouTube or Facebook each week.
We can already hear you say, “but when will I have time to put together any videos?” We understand how many directions our clients get pulled on a daily basis. So we’re offering several new types of video and similar interactive content that require zero effort on your part to create.
- Blog videos: We’ll use your existing blog content to produce short videos that can be shared on social media and added to the blog post itself for audiences that prefer visual content.
- Newsletter videos: Expand your newsletter audience by offering the option to view monthly specials and news in an easy-to-view video format.
- Photo gallery preview widget: Showcase up to 5 cases from your gallery right on the relevant procedure page, giving more access to your best cases to encourage website visitors to take the next step.
- Interactive infographics: By animating an infographic, it becomes even more eye-cathing. These are particularly good for social media posts.
We will still be producing written content that is both valuable to search engines and good ol’ fashioned readers. But the shift to more interactive content shows no signs of letting up and it’s critical that your practice’s messaging is delivered in the mediums most people online want.
A Push for Website Accessibility
We just wrote about this last month so we’ll keep it short. Website accessibility has gone from the “right” thing to do to the “necessary” thing to do. (Oh, and it’s also still the right thing to do!) What’s accessibility in a nutshell? It’s all about making sure your website can be experienced by the full community of web users. You can absolutely face large legal costs battling an accessibility lawsuit, but more importantly, if even 5+% of web users can’t get the full experience on your site, that’s a huge audience to leave out in the cold when every new patient counts.
We’ll be helping clients attain and maintain compliance with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. This is the level the web community has accepted as complying with the needs of the Federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Increased Social Media Focus
We’ll be blunt: our most successful clients are also the most active on social media. Coincidence? Nope. For several years, we’ve been partnering with most of our clients to create the best possible user experience on their social media channels. But for those clients who still didn’t see the value, we’ve been willing to take a back seat.
Not anymore. A lively, on-brand social media presence is essential for your practice. If you’re already doing a great job – kudos. But if it’s been weeks since you last posted to Facebook or Instagram, that has to change in 2021.
We’re adjusting our levels of support so that we can better meet the needs of clients where they are now and help them deliver the messaging and experience they need on social media. We’ve also started a content library focused specifically on aesthetic medicine, exclusively offered to our clients.
PPC Becomes Essential
We’ve talked a lot in recent years about how pay-to-play opportunities on the web are an increasingly important part of the marketing mix. Paid social ads and Google ads have become more and more integrated in these platforms, to the point where it can be very hard to tell sponsored posts from more traditional organic content.
We understand the reluctance to allocate additional spend for paid media placement. But there’s just no way around it and if you want to maximize your reach (and stay ahead of your competitors) your practice needs to implement a targeted pay per click (PPC) effort.
The good news is that PPC can pay off handsomely. As we documented earlier in the year, PPC has an excellent return on investment. So even if you’re paying for ads, those ads more than pay for themselves through increased practice revenue. It’s a lesson all of our practices who have launched campaigns have learned.
Summing up, we’re excited to make some bigger shifts in 2021 and continue to seek out new marketing opportunities so our clients can stay ahead of the game. For our clients, keep an eye out in December for updated marketing plans that integrate the tactics your practice needs to continue to be successful in 2021 and beyond!