A recent survey published in The McKinsey Quarterly, the Online Journal of McKinsey & Company, explored how companies are using the Web to reach customers throughout the marketing-related decision-making process. Respondents indicated that by 2010, they expect a majority of their customers to discover new products or services online and a third to purchase goods there. These expectations appear to be driving plans for future Web- and marketing-related spending.
Read more…
Have the days of the huge clinical enterprise Web site come to an end? Has the “everything about our hospital/health system” site strategy finally lost its usefulness? Is general health library content no longer of value? Will targeted clinical service micro-sites and landing pages tied to online ads replace the CMS-driven content monsters we now serve? Are organic search optimization techniques losing out to search engine marketing and adwords? It’s Marketing 2.0 There’s a compelling logic to moving our energies away from our current broad based – dare I say, shotgun – marketing strategies toward more focused, performance driven, interactive marketing campaigns with the Internet at the center rather than as an afterthought. These coordinated campaigns are laser-like in focus, highly flexible, tightly budgeted, locked into analytical tools, and exquisitely measurable. The logic of this flows from clear marketing objectives tied to performance goals: new appointments in profitable services, cost-effectively increasing consumer mind share in new markets, increasing awareness and referrals among in physicians regionally and nationally, and new hires of physicians and nurses in profitable services that lack the capacity to take increase patient loads. In future blogs I will be talking about the mechanics of these campaigns and their components: Read more…
Welcome to the Greystone blog! Those of you that know us, know that we truly believe that the use of the Internet — as a business tool — in hospitals is imperative, yet, quite frankly, extremely underutilized. Hospitals are notoriously slow to change and accept new things, especially when it comes to electronic medium. Yes, there are many of you that are doing great things, and it takes those pioneers to continue to advance the state of the state. But there are still many of us that are struggling to justify the resources just to have a Web site. For the past few years, we’ve observed such a tremendous growth in the use of social media for healthcare. Web 2.0 is not the future anymore, it’s here. Whether we like it or not; whether we are prepared for it or not; it is here, and not going away.
Read more…