Category Archives: Our Top Tips

How to come up with fresh, new content ideas

Content is king, but constantly having to come up with new content ideas can be exhausting: How do you keep your ideas fresh and exciting? Are there any fool proof methods for coming up with content ideas?

What questions are your audience asking?

One of the easiest ways, and also most important ways, to come up with content ideas is to consider the questions that your audience is asking. What is it that they want to know? What are they likely to be searching for online? What will lead them through their buyers’ journey?

You can be the one that is there to answer their questions, like a knight in shining armour. Anticipating the needs of your audience and being ready to address them is how you build trust, which is fundamental for leads becoming customers.

Marcus Sheridan writes about the importance of this in his book They Ask, You Answer. It’s one of our favourite reads here at Podymos, and it’s a stance on content marketing that we absolutely stand by.

So, how do you find out what questions your audience are asking?

Talk to your team

What better way to understand your customers than to speak to the people who interact with them every day? This might be your sales team, commercial team or maybe your marketing team. To launch a truly successful content marketing plan, you really need to have a level of enthusiasm and dedication from your whole team. The best ideas come from working together.

Your sales and customer facing teams are likely to be faced with the same questions from customers time and time again, so imagine if you were able to answer those questions before they even asked them? All of these questions make a great starting point for content.

Search engine research

If you haven’t managed to come up with enough ideas by talking to your team (which is unlikely!) there are other methods of discovering the questions your audience is asking.

Search engines and SEO keyword tools can tell you a lot about what is popular online. Keyword research can give you an idea of popular topics, whilst Google’s related searches and search predictions can give you a closer look into how people are searching for those keywords.

At the bottom of search engine results pages you will see a list of related results.

When typing a query into Google, it will autocomplete to show other popular searches.

Social listening

Social listening is all about being active in your industry on social media. What are the trending topics? What are people discussing and debating?

By following closely, and getting actively involved in talking to your audience, you will be able to glean the topics that matter to them and what questions they’re asking.

What will lead them on their buyer’s journey?

A great way to come up with content ideas is to sit down and consider the journey of your ideal customer. Think about the stages they are likely to go through and the questions they might have along the way. What matters to them? What is going to help them decide to convert?

Ensuring your audience can find the answers to these questions is what will expedite their buyer’s journey and build trust with you instead of your competitors.

The big 5

In They Ask, You Answer, Sheridan introduces “the big 5”, a set of topics that all businesses should be writing about. You can use the big 5 to quickly and easily create an impressive number of content ideas. You can use the big 5 as a starting point, creating a table and populating each topic with content ideas.

The big 5 are as follows.

1. Cost and pricing

Many companies are reluctant to discuss their costs and pricing, afraid that it will drive away customers, or reveal too much to competitors.

Whilst these are valid concerns, it’s worth considering what harm this would actually cause to your business.

Customers will find out about pricing at one point or another, so what’s the harm in them excluding themselves early on, rather than spending time and energy on converting them when they’re not appropriate anyway?

In terms of competitors, you may be worried that they will be able to undercut you, but this shouldn’t concern you so long as you’re confident in what you’re offering and that you’re doing it better than your competitors. Furthermore, if you’re talking about price and they aren’t, who is more likely to win the customer in the end?

Addressing costs in your content is so important when it comes to building trust with your audience. Instead of keeping it hidden away, you are being completely open and transparent, which will only win you favour.

2. Problems

Another of your main topics should be based around the problems your audience may be facing, but also the problems they might find with your product or service.

When you address problems up front, you are probably also able to offer solutions. Not only does acknowledging problems show a high level of transparency, it shows that you genuinely care about the needs of your audience.

When you talk about problems and are able to suggest solutions, your audience will naturally be more inclined to trust you.

3. Best

Last time you were searching for an offering of some sort, it’s likely that you used the word “best” to get the information you were looking for. As humans, we naturally gravitate towards that word, because it’s strong and it’s final.

When we put our time into something, we want it to be right, so we search for the best.

This might refer to products, to companies or even to best practices. What information could your company offer the “best” information on?

4. Comparisons

The internet has made it so easy to find out information that people have naturally become more picky when it comes to making financial decisions.

When people invest in something, be it a product or a service, they want to know how it compares to what else is out there and if it delivers everything they need.

Being the one to provide that information develops you as a trusted source. You demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about and therefore can be trusted.

5. Reviews

Buyers always wanted to know what they’re signing up for before making a purchase, they want to know that they’re making the right decision and often, hearing from someone else who has tried what they’re considering will help them to decide.

Reviews are the equivalent to word of mouth, which is extremely powerful. Reviewing your own offerings and being completely honest can help to build trust. You may also be able to use customer reviews to create content.

Check out your competitors

We’re not suggesting copying any content from your competitors, in fact when you explore their content, you may find that they are focusing on creating content that doesn’t encourage the customer journey. This is also referred to as “fluff”, because it is just filling a space, rather than actually helping you to achieve tangible results.

You can look to your competitors to find what they’re missing and take inspiration from what they’re posting about. Are they talking about topics you hadn’t considered? It’s great to explore that. Are you looking at their site and thinking that something is missing? You can fill that gap on your own site.

Whatever you do, whether it’s taking inspiration from their content or ensuring that your content is in no way like theirs, you need to ensure that what you’re doing is better. That means focuses on producing high-quality content that will convert, rather than content creation for the sake of being seen. In summary, each piece of content must help move the buyer through their journey. If it doesn’t it’s most likely not worth writing.

Refresh your old content

If you’re really stumped for ideas (this shouldn’t happen if everyone is involved in your content planning, as new questions always come up from customers), why not look back at your old stuff? You may wonder if that’s actually a good use of your time – surely if you’ve already done it, you have nothing to add?

That isn’t true at all, in fact, refreshing and repurposing your old content is one of the best things you can do for the health of your website. Updating old content is considered a “quick win” for SEO as it shows search engines that you’re not just posting and forgetting about your content, you’re keeping it fresh so that it is genuinely valuable to people.

Look back at old articles and see how you could improve them or maybe you have some longer articles that could be split out into more specific detailed articles.

You can also repurpose old articles, creating videos and social media posts from them.

Basically, not all your content ideas have to be brand new, some of the best ideas have already happened and just need to be built upon.

Keeping content creation simple

As you can see, creating content is quite a big undertaking. Coming up with new ideas can seem overwhelming at times, but it really doesn’t have to be once you boil it down to addressing the needs of your audience and moving them along in your journey.

Consider idea creation as an ongoing process, rather than a stop-start process that you go through every couple of weeks. It can be something that is constantly going on in the background, every time a member of your team talks to a customer, every time you see a relevant interaction on social media. All these small instances could be just the start of a fully-fledged piece of content, or even several pieces of content.

Content creation at Podymos

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality, converting content as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing and content creation.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.

How to create the best Medical Device website

Are you in the early stages of developing a website for your Medical Device company?

Or maybe you already have an established website, but are hoping to improve its performance?

Either way, you probably already know just how vital your website is to your business.

It’s the hub of all your activity. Sure, people can learn about you on social media, they can look across your various platforms to get a feel for your company, but when they’re making the all-important decision on whether to get in contact with you, it’s most likely your website they go to for that final step, so it needs to be the best it can be.

We’re a marketing agency specifically for Medical Device, and we’ve built many websites for clients over the years, however you don’t necessarily need to be a website expert to create a website that will deliver for your business. In fact, we know that just a few small tweaks could massively improve the performance of your site.

Whether you already have a website, or you’re considering building one, this article will tell you what you need to know to get the best out of it, from how it looks to how well it works.

Make it findable

Firstly, you need to make sure that your audience can find your website, and that it’s not hidden away in a dusty corner of the internet. Bring your website out into the light, proudly display it for the world to see.

You’ve probably heard of SEO (search engine optimisation), which is incredibly important, but you should be making sure that all your marketing channels are converging to your website, which is what we mean when we say that your website should be the hub of all your activity.

Your social media posts, email campaigns, and any other digital offerings should all drive traffic towards your website.

Even your offline materials can link to your pages using QR codes. Think brochures, packaging and congress collaterals – they could all contribute to your website’s traffic.

So, when you’re coming up with your marketing plans, always think about how it’s driving your audience on their customer journey, and on channels that aren’t your website, it should probably be by driving them towards your website.

We haven’t dived into SEO here as it is such a big topic, but, we have written several articles on it, so if you want to become an SEO expert, have a look at the below:

• Complete guide to SEO
• Deep dive into keyword research
• Medical Device digital marketing guide

Showcase your brand

The power of branding can be underestimated. Some companies believe branding is just a logo and colours, and nothing more.

Actually, branding is a culmination of all visual assets, as well as underlying messaging that reflects the ethos of your company.

As opposed to being something you can see, branding provokes feeling, and your website is the perfect opportunity to showcase it. Whilst your website does need to look good, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your brand.

All the visuals on your site should be built around your brand, which includes the colours, the copy and imagery. Everything down to the shape of the buttons should be consistent and recognisably you.

Answer your audiences’ questions

This is probably the most important aspect in creating a successful website – does it answer your audiences’ questions?

On average, it’s estimated that 70-80% of the buying decision is now made before a buyer evens contacts you. The internet has given us access to more information than ever before, and people want to feel confident in their decision before they commit.

So, they’ll use your website as a place to find out what they need to know about you. Only when they feel a level of confidence like that, will they decide to reach out to you. During this process, inappropriate customers will exclude themselves, making life easier for your sales team.

Additionally, being honest and answering all their questions up front will build trust with your audience. If you’re being open and not keeping anything back, they can trust that you’re not going to suddenly spring something on them that they weren’t expecting.

Marcus Sheridan’s book “They ask, you answer” discusses the power of this philosophy in depth and is definitely worth a read.

To put this philosophy into practice, try writing down all the questions your audience will have before reaching out to you. These will probably be based on the questions you hear every day from your customers and leads, so it’s important to get different members of your team involved in coming up with these questions.

If you already have a site, does it answer these questions? Where can you find them? If you’re building a site, you can use this list of questions as a basis for the content you need to include on your website.

Lead users on a journey

Once you know what information your users are looking for; you need to consider how easy it is for them to find it. Do they have to trawl through pages of content to find it? Or is it in a logical place where they would expect it to be?

If they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they’ll more than likely click away, to find out if one of your competitors has what they’re looking for.

You also need to consider the different journeys of the users on your site, and how you can encourage them through it. This is known as conversion optimisation, and it’s how you encourage users to take a desired action, such as getting in contact or making a purchase.

Realistically, ensuring your website is set up to convert is the key to its success, because even if you have huge numbers of visitors, if they aren’t converting, what is the point?

Monitor your performance

How do optimise for conversion? Data is one of the main ways. How can you tell how well your website is performing if you don’t look at the data?

When building your website, you need to ensure that it is set up well report. If you’re just looking to improve the performance of your current website, why not see how you can improve your current way of reporting?

Smaller teams will probably find that Google Analytics provides all the data that they need, but larger teams with a reporting budget may want to invest in software like HubSpot. Either way, the most important thing is that you’re looking at the right metrics for your goals.

When deciding what metrics to report on, you need to consider what they actually tell you and how full a picture you’re getting. Sure, looking at the visitors to your website is exciting, but what are they doing once they get to your site? Again, is there any point in knowing this if they aren’t converting?

A few questions to ask yourself include:

• What are your visitors doing on your site?
• Are they staying or are they leaving straight away?
• What pages are people leaving the site on the most? Why could that be?
• Are they getting halfway through converting and then stopping? Why?

You can find these answers in the data, and then create actionable insights, wherein you optimise your site based on what the data is telling you.

Medical Device websites from Podymos

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want a high-quality website that looks good and performs well to support your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.

What to expect when working with a healthcare agency for social media

Are you wondering how to improve your social media channels and are considering professional help? Maybe you’re just curious about what working with a healthcare agency is like?

How an agency could help

Not every company needs the help of an agency. For some, their in-house team has all the capabilities needed for a successful marketing strategy, others can supplement their team using freelancers.

For other companies though, working with an agency can help them achieve better results from their social media strategy.

Social media is time-consuming. It involves lots of planning, content creation and reporting. An agency can take on all of this work, freeing up time to be spent on other important aspects of the business.

As well as that, working with an agency allows access to team members with different specialities, such as strategists, copywriters and designers.

You can still create amazing social media campaigns without these specialists, but they can certainly help to give a professional edge to feeds.

Finally, agencies have a lot of experience to offer companies. They’ve already experimented to find out what works best and are likely always looking to keep at the top of their game, always striving to improve. This takes all the guess work away from companies, so that they’re more likely to see success earlier on.

Budget

Pricing is usually one of the biggest considerations when deciding to work with an agency, but this will vary from agency to agency.

Non-specialist agencies will probably offer lower prices, but as a result, may need more input from you regarding your industry. Specialist agencies, with experience and knowledge in your area, are likely to charge more for what they do, but can offer peace of mind over more general agencies.

In Medical Device, you need to make sure your agency has a good understanding of Medical Device marketing regulations to avoid any repercussions.

We’ve created a guide to social media pricing, which outlines everything included when working with an agency and the costs you can expect to pay.

The stages of delivering social media campaigns

When you work with an agency, you’ll be getting a lot more than last minutes adhoc posts (although there is room for that when needed). In fact, there’s a lot of planning that goes on behind the scenes before posts are even created, let alone uploaded.

3/6 month plan creation

The first step will usually be creating a plan. Agencies may differ on how long in advance they will plan for, but at Podymos, we use social media as a platform to build a story in your audience’s minds, so we tend to deliver 3- and 6-month plans. We also know that it takes time to build momentum on social media.

Content plans will usually be based on the topics, themes or questions that are most important to your audience, as that’s what’s most likely to engage them. Sure, advertising the benefits of your device is important, but it won’t be as interesting to your audience as discussion of the problems they face every day will be.

As a guide, only about 15% of your content should focus on your company, the rest should be about providing value for your audience.

The plan will usually include a brief description of each post and when it will be posted, as well as the type of visual. Will it be a video? Gif? Static image? All of that image will be included in the initial plan.

Plans are sent out in advance so that you can check that you are happy with the post ideas. This offers you a chance to leave out any topics you’d rather not discuss.

Social media style creation

This stage of the process won’t be necessary for companies who already have a social media look, but for those that don’t, your agency will need to put together a guide based on your branding.

It’s important to do this because your posts need to be consistent in terms of how they look so that they are instantly recognisable by your audience. Being recognisable also means you’re memorable, which is an important step in building trust.

Your agency will obviously consult with you on the look, ensuring that you’re happy with the finished results.

f this step is needed, it’ll take longer to deliver your first social media plan, but after that, creating everything can take as little as…

Post creation

Once you have signed off on the post briefs and the look of your posts, it’s time for the agency to build your posts.

Typically, agencies will have copywriters and designers who have been briefed about your social media goals, branding, and general information about your company and device. They will then be able to build the separate components of the posts, bringing them together in one place for easy review.

For instance, copy and visuals (as well as other necessary information like wordcounts and hashtags) may be added to a PowerPoint, so that they can be easily checked.

Once quality checked in-house by several team members, the posts will be sent to you for review. Hopefully, you’ll be happy with the posts and won’t need any changes, but if you do, your agency will be able to make those changes and send them to you once again for review.

Scheduling posts

Nothing will ever be posted until you’re completely happy with it, but once that stage is reached, your agency will probably choose to schedule your posts using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. This means that posts will always go out on time and you don’t have to worry.

To do this, your agency will need access to your social media accounts, but they will be able to talk you through how to do this.

Once all of your posts are scheduled, you can sit back and your agency can get started on your next round of social media posts, repeating the process again.

Reporting

Your agency will be able to produce monthly reports for you on how your social media (and any other channels they are helping you with) are performing.

This will allow your agency to see what is working and where there needs to be adjustments to optimise your future social media posts.

For example, if posts on a certain topic are performing well, your agency might recommend doing more posts on that topic.

They’ll also be able to look beyond the channels you’re posting on to tell you how social media is helping your overall marketing strategy. For instance, they can check if your posts are driving traffic to your website to get you conversions – which is probably what you actually want to achieve, rather than just gaining followers, which is how you will go about achieving your overall goal.

In our Medical Device marketing podcast on the top social media mistakes, we discuss how important it is to look at metrics that tell you how well social media is performing for your marketing as a whole, rather than just how well you’re performing on social media.

How to prepare

The joy of working with an agency is that the majority of work is taken off your hands, leaving you free to get on with other things. You may be worried that the agency won’t fully understand what you want from your social media, which it’s important that you and your agency understand each other prior to starting work.

You can prepare for this by ensuring you are prepared to talk about the following topics:

Who is your audience?

What are the topics that interest them? What are the problems they face on a daily basis?

Who are your competitors?

What are other companies in your area doing on social media? Are there any accounts that you find particularly interesting?

What should the posts be about?

What are the topics and themes that your audience cares about? What are the questions that you’re asked by customers the most?

What are your goals?

Are you looking to raise awareness of your brand? Are you hoping to gain leads? This will affect the social media plans.

Social media at Podymos

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality social media campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.

And don’t forget to follow us on social media

4 tips for Medical Device social media success

Do you want to introduce social media into your Medical Device marketing strategy but aren’t really sure where to start?

Or maybe you’re hoping to increase your success on social media but aren’t sure how?

Social media can be an excellent way to boost brand awareness, generate leads and build an online community. In fact, research has shown that 68% of marketers use social media to generate leads.

In this article, we’re going to share 4 tips for how to successfully use social media as part of your wider Medical Device marketing strategy.

Be Genuine

Sticking to several core topics or values with a clear and defined message is important. This consistency will help your brand develop an honest and authentic online reputation, which in turn will build trust with your audience.

Developing trust is crucial when it comes to making sales or generating leads, in fact, 80% of people said that trust was the deciding factor in their buying decisions.

The best way to do this is to consistently post about a selection of topics that your brand is committed to, for instance, the problems your audience is facing, updates in your field, and community-building.

Outright product promotion can appear too intense, whereas discussing subjects that your audience cares about shows that your company also cares.

Something you should stay clear of is posting inconsistently about a range of different and unrelated topics based on trends, or posting about awareness days that you don’t actively support. This could lead to mistrust amongst your audience as you’re not being authentic.

Instead of posting for the sake of posting, companies need to use their posts to build a picture of their brand in the minds of their audience. Like putting together the pieces of a puzzle to get the complete picture.

Listen to the data

Monitoring your data is one of the most important parts of social media marketing for Medical Device promotion. Without reporting on the performance of your posts, you really have no idea of how well you’re doing, and how you could be better.

Impressions and engagement rate

Two important metrics to look at are the number of impressions your posts are receiving and their engagement rates. Impressions refers to the number of people who have seen your posts whist engagement rate refers to interactions such a likes, comments and shares.

A high number of impressions means that your posts are being seen by a large audience, introducing more people to your brand, so it’s probably a metric you’ll want to examine closely if brand awareness is your main marketing goal.

Engagement rate is also an incredibly important metric, as it’s an indicator of the quality of your posts and how well your audience is receiving them. You can then optimise your posting based on this. For example, if you’re seeing that some posts are doing better than others, you can look for what those posts have in common and decide to do more of whatever that is.

Check out our article on engagement rate optimisation for a better understanding of its importance and how to optimise it.

Posting time

To ensure posts are successful, you need to upload when your audience is most active. Studies show that the first hour after you post is when you will receive 50% of your total engagement. Posting when your audience is online will naturally increase how much that 50% represents and therefore how much engagement you receive overall.

In practice this might mean that a post at 2 pm that gets 4 likes within the first hour will go on to get 8 likes. If a post at 11 am gets 8 likes within the first hour, it could go on to get 16 likes overall.

You can find out the best time to post for your particular audience by examining your analytics. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Hootsuite have analytic sections where you can browse all the data collected from your posts.

Conversion rate

If your goal is to use social media to generate more leads, then you need to look at the metrics as part of a larger campaign. The majority of your posts should be linking back to your website, which should be set up for conversion

You can see how well your posts are performing in terms of driving traffic to your site by looking at the click-through rate of each individual post. Alternatively, you can look at your acquisition data on Google Analytics to understand how well social is doing compared to your other channels.

You can also measure the conversion rate of your social traffic. Are they purchasing from you? Are they getting in contact with you?

If conversion rate isn’t great, you can look into why that might be, and consider if there is anything you can do to make conversion easier for your audience.

If you have more questions about how to use social media metrics to your advantage, why not check out our article on why social media reporting is important.

Building online communities

Building an online community is an excellent way to engage and build trust with your audience, but how do you do it?

One way is to develop a dialogue with your audience. You can post about the problems they’re likely to experience and open a forum for discussion. Your audience can discuss their own experiences, and your company can get involved in the conversation. Seeing that a company is trying to be genuinely helpful will pay off significantly.

Another way is to bring key opinion leaders or influencers into your brand. You may think that being in Medical Device, influencers may not be relevant, but that’s not the case. There are plenty of influencers on social media who focus on their own medical stories, sharing their experiences to help and support others.

Additionally, there are many doctors on social media who share health advice and help raise awareness about certain conditions. These types of people are the best accounts to reach out to as they can not only add a certain amount of personality and relatability to your brand, but you can also reach their audience.

Follow the rules and regulations

There are many benefits to Medical Device promotion on social media, but there are also limitations. Some images or videos may be too graphic for platform content guidelines, so be sure that you check the rules before posting any graphic content or put a trigger warning in the caption.

Failing to follow the rules and community guidelines of the platform you’re posting on can have significant consequences. Not only will your post be removed, but your whole account may be suspended, so it’s best to play it safe.

Furthermore, everything you post on social media is in the public domain, which means that it is subject to regulations. This means it’s important that you’re clued up on the EU MDR.

Generally, you’re not restricted by what you can say on social media, as long as it matches the claims in your intended purpose. You do need to check the regulations in your country though and discuss with your regulatory team.

Hopefully, this article has given you a good overview of Medical Device social media marketing, on what are the best tactics for medical device promotion. By keeping these ideas in mind, you’ll be able to help strengthen and develop your online presence.

Medical Device social media at Podymos

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality social media campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.

And don’t forget to follow us on social media

How to optimise Medical Device email campaigns in 2023?

Want to get the most out of your emails but don’t know where you’re going wrong or how to get started?

Podymos is here to help, with 5 ways to optimise email campaigns in 2023.

Emails are a great marketing tool as they allow you to get directly in front of your audience by arriving straight into their inbox. It’s a huge channel that’s only growing.

This article will show you how to connect with your audience through email and how to get the best results from your campaigns.

We’ll look at:

1. Personalising your emails
2. Curating your email content
3. How to tailor your emails to your audience
4. Monitoring your email subscribers
5. Looking after your subscriber’s privacy

Personalisation

Personality is key when sending an email out to your subscriber list. No one wants to read an email that looks like it was written by a robot.

Adding that personal touch to the sender’s details and subject line can massively impact the success of the email. They’re the very first things that your subscriber will see and could be the difference between an opened email and an ignored one. 

Make sure that the sender’s address has a name, as people are more likely to interact with a person rather than a company. This is adjustable on most email platforms, like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.

As for your subject line, (the opening line at the top of your email) keep it short and snappy telling your subscribers what the email is about and giving them the incentive to read more. Be sure to use friendly and open language, that won’t overwhelm your subscriber such as “TRY NOW” or “WHILE STOCKS LAST”.

Keep it short and sweet

The content of your email is the most important part of your campaign, so ensure that your text is relevant to your audience. Keep it clear and concise with a simple “Call To Action” (CTA) in which you tell your subscriber exactly what you’d like them to do. This should be in line with the objective of the campaign.

The human eye is automatically drawn to visual elements, so use plenty of images and graphics, rather than large chunks of text. You can keep your emails consistent by setting up a template so that your emails don’t become too heavy with text.

Unsure about how to write for Medical Device? Have a look at our article on Writing high quality content in Medical Device marketing.

Another way to keep your content engaging is by adding links to images and text. Whether it sends them to your website, social media, or other articles that you’re referencing, it’s a great way to track engagement.

This can be done by looking at the click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of subscribers who have opened your email and engaged it by clicking on at least one link in your campaign.

CTR is available to track on most platforms and is a great way to see how many people are interacting with your email.

If your CTR is low then you need either create more engaging content for your subscribers to interact with or troubleshoot your emails as some of your links are broken. You should also check your subscriber list to see if any of your emails have bounced.

Tailor to your audience

Segmenting your audience, by dividing your subscriber lists into different categories is a great way to engage with your subscribers and keep your content relevant.

You can do this by collecting relevant information on your subscribers such as age, location, and gender. Building up your knowledge and understanding of your customers will help you to anticipate their wants and needs and send them relevant content.

Now you can target your marketing more succinctly and send the most relevant updates to the right people.

For instance, if there has been an increase in people from a certain city buying a particular product, you may want to consider telling other people in that area about that product too.

Monitor your subscribers

Subscriber interactions can tell you a lot about your audience, particularly what content interests them and what doesn’t. Here are a few key things you should look for when monitoring your mailing list and why. 

A loss of subscribers could indicate that some of your audience isn’t interested in the type of content that you’re putting out. You may need to curate your content to make it more relevant to your audience.

Look into the type of people who aren’t opening your emails and see what they could have in common, maybe they’re in the same demographic. If so, break them out into different segments and change your approach.

A high open rate (the number of people opening your emails) combined with a low CTR could tell you that lots of people are opening your emails, but they’re not interacting with them. This might suggest that they’re interested enough to open the email but not enough to follow through by clicking any links.

Test, Test, Test

We have all sent out an important email only to notice a typo when it’s too late. Sending multiple tests to yourself and colleagues before hitting send for real can save you a fair amount of embarrassment.

Check over your content, links, and images to see if everything is in order. It’s a good idea to get into the habit of using a checklist when reviewing your emails, so you never miss a mistake again.

Catch those typos before it’s too late. It’s also important to check how your email looks on different types of devices, from laptops to phones to tablets. You need to be sure that the format works well on all devices as 81% of emails are checked on phone.

Privacy

Safety and looking after your subscribers are just as important as sending out emails with your latest news. The best way to ensure that your subscribers are interested in your emails give them the option to double opt-in to your emails.

This means that they have to check two boxes rather than one to confirm that they want you to email them as nothing is worst and will turn people off than being added to an email list that you didn’t sign up for.

How to make it work for you

So, there it is!

Emails are a great marketing tool that can be used to spread brand awareness, update subscribers on new information and promote products and services. If there were a few key takeaways for you to take with you are to make sure that your emails are always personalised, engaging and most of all fun. Keep your content short and snappy and filled with pictures and easy-to-understand graphics.

However, if you only remember one thing from this article is that you should always test your emails before you send them. Send them to a friend or colleague, send them to yourself and check them on your phone.

Medical Device emails at Podymos

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality email campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no-obligation chat.

10 Medical Device marketing mistakes on social media

Are you looking to get started posting on social media and want to know what to avoid?

Maybe you’ve been posting for a while but aren’t getting the traction you expected?

Either way, knowing the top mistakes people make when it comes to medical device social media marketing could be extremely helpful

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to audit your social media accounts to see where improvements could be made and come up with a strategy to start posting the right way.

The top 10 social mistakes we see made in Medical Device marketing are (there may of course be others, but this is our experience):

1. Not having a goal
2. Not knowing your audience
3. Getting swept up by trends
4. Posting on too many platforms
5. Posting the same content across all platforms
6. Not varying types of posts
7. Being over-promotional
8. Not interacting with users
9. Not being consistent
10. Measuring the wrong metrics

1. Not having a goal

The first step of social media is often one that is forgotten, and that is determining your goal. What is it you’re hoping to get out of social media marketing? This will dictate where, when and what you post and if social media is, in fact, the correct platform for your marketing efforts.

Are you looking to raise brand awareness, create a community, drive lead conversions or super charge your recruitment?

Whatever it is, clarifying your goal will help to quickly determine your strategy.

2. Not knowing your audience

Similar to being clear on your overall goal, you need to be clear about whom you’re targeting on social media, which means knowing your audience well.

Your audience personas should be specific, including information like their typical ages, job titles and geographies. This will also be useful if you decide to run any paid social media, as you can tell each platform which people to target.

More importantly though, you need to know the interests of your target audience, what the problems are they face and the issues that they care about. This information will inform you on what you should be posting about.

3. Getting swept up by trends

From time to time, companies jump on the bandwagon of the latest trend. Although this can be useful for getting eyes on your post, if they’re not the eyes of your audience, what’s the point?

You should only take part in trends if the circumstances are right and you’re able to post content that is relevant, authentic and on topic in your field.

Again, it comes back to knowing your goal. Everything you post should help you achieve that goal, and having lots of impressions on your post doesn’t necessarily help you to do that if they’re not from the right people.

This is where vanity vs. sanity measures come in. It’s critical that your measures are a meaningful indication of you meeting your goal (e.g. Impressions vs. conversions)

4. Posting on too many platforms

You might think the more platforms you post on the better, but that really isn’t the case. Posting on every single social platform can be like shouting into an empty room. Your audience isn’t likely to be engaged and listening on every platform.

In Medical Devices, platforms like Pinterest and Instagram aren’t necessarily the best places to post. Despite their popularity, it’s not really where HCPs are looking to engage with you. If you’re looking to communicate with patients, Instagram and Facebook may be more appropriate but your content will need to be different.

Instead of trying to post on as many platforms as possible, focus on posting on selected platforms and doing it well. Prioritise the platforms where you know your audience is. That way, you won’t waste time creating content that won’t contribute to your end goal.

Check out on our article on the best social media platforms to help you decide where to prioritise your time.

5. Posting the same content on every platform

In a similar vein, you might think it’s a good idea to save time by reposting the same content across multiple platforms, but you’ll quickly find it doesn’t really work like that.

Not only might it look lazy to people who follow you across those multiple platforms, but it can also appear unprofessional, as your audiences consume different types of content depending on their chosen platform.

Additionally, different platforms have different design requirements, so at a minimum each post will need to be optimised accordingly.

Finally, you might find that different types of posts will perform better on some platforms than others. For instance, posting videos on Twitter might get more engagement, whereas static visuals do better on LinkedIn. In which case, you should prioritise and post accordingly.

6. Not varying types of posts

Posting on social media is hard work and it might be tempting to continuously take the easy route and post similar visuals again and again. That can be damaging, as you’re not giving yourself room to experiment and find out what works best for your company.

There’s so many different post types out there, such as videos, audio clips, PDFs, GIFs and so on. Social media gives companies the chance to get creative and do something different, so seize that opportunity.

Try out different ways of delivering content, so that you can learn what your audience finds the most engagement. This will help you to see better results in the long run.

7. Being over-promotional

One of the biggest mistakes we see is when companies are too promotional. It might sound counterintuitive to say, but Medical Device marketing isn’t only about promoting your device, it’s also about building trust with your audience by showing that you care about the same topics and problems that they do.

If your audience want to know about the features and benefits of your device, they will seek that information out (which should be easy to find), but to capture their attention in the first place, you need to engage them with something they already care about.

Again, this is where knowing your audience comes in. A post about a problem they face every day is more likely to make someone stop scrolling than the latest data on your device. That is the only way to cut through the noise and get noticed on social media.

We are not saying you shouldn’t be promotional, but it needs to be in moderation. Think about how you want your audience to view your company. You need to make a mosaic in their minds of who your company is, and each social media post is a part of that mosaic.

If all posts are promotional, your company may be perceived as over-promotional and uncaring, however if they’re interspaced with posts about your company culture and educational events, then a very different picture will be formed.

As a rule of thumb promotional content shouldn’t make up any more than 10-15% of your feed. The rest should be adding value.

8. Not interacting with users

You may have heard the phrase “don’t post and ghost” and it really is one to live by in social media marketing. It refers to the act of publishing content and then forgetting about it, failing to engage with users who have commented.

You should always respond when you receive mentions or comments on social media, because it shows your audience and the algorithms that you’re present and involved in the conversation. Otherwise, your social media efforts can seem impersonal and inauthentic.

This is even more important just after a post is released as the more engagement you get early on in a post’s lifecycle, the more popular the platforms will think it is. This can mean that your post is shown more widely, beyond your immediate network.

Finally, engaging with your audience is a fantastic way to start building a community. Make sure you thank commenters for their support or answer their questions and get involved in their debates. If all goes well your community will develop with you at the centre. Trust (and sales) will naturally follow.

9. Not being consistent

Inconsistency is easily the biggest issue across social media. A common misconception is that it’s okay to post sporadically when time allows or an idea appears, but this can do more harm than good.

Algorithms determining what content shows up in newsfeeds don’t reward sporadic pages, and people are also less likely to follow a page that doesn’t post regularly.

Posting consistently allows your social media efforts to gain the momentum they need to bring you success.

There are many articles out there that indicate the idea cadence for posting. This can be from 3 times per week to 5 times per day.

However, this is not always possible as it takes a significant amount of time to create a content plan every 3 months, write the copy, design the posts (or film a video) and schedule and monitor them all.

We delve further into planning content in our medical device social media guide, which discusses everything you need to know about planning your strategy.

10. Measuring the wrong metrics

When you post and forget about it, you end up ignoring a whole wealth of data that’s available to you, that will allow you to get the most out of social media.

You can look at metrics such as impressions and engagement to gauge how people are responding to your content. This’ll initially help you to optimise your future activities, but ultimately you want to set conversion goals so you can truly measure how your activities are impacting your technologies adoption.

Additionally, platforms like Hootsuite will provide more information, such as the days when you are seeing the most activity, and therefore when you should prioritise posting.

If you would like to learn more, check out our article on the importance of social media reporting.

Working with a social media agency

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality social media campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.

How to increase social media engagement in Medical Device marketing

Have you been posting on social media for a while now, but aren’t seeing as many comments and likes as you expected?

Engagement on social media is one of the most important metrics you should be looking at.

It indicates the quality of your posts, as opposed to impressions which only shows how far they have reached.

Increasing your engagement rate can transform your social media presence and generate leads at a substantial rate (even for medical device companies).

We’re here to shed some light on what can be done to improve engagement on your social media posts and ensure that your audience is interacting with you.

What is engagement and why does it matter?

Every time someone interacts with a post on social media it counts as engagement, and for many, this is their main measure of success on social media. Engagement includes likes, comments, clicks, shares and mentions.

For many companies, getting eyes on their posts (aka impressions) is the main priority, but is this necessarily good for business? Without also getting good engagement, it’s like a comedian performing to a sold-out arena, but none of the audience are laughing or even listening.

Engagement is so important because, as mentioned earlier, it indicates the quality of your posts – higher quality posts are likely to receive more engagement, and a more engaged audience is more likely to convert.

High engagement rates also inform social media platforms algorithms (which dictate what is shown and when) that your content is worth sharing, extending the reach of your posts. So, creating engaging content can help to increase your brand awareness, as well as nurturing your current audience.

Know your audience

If you’ve read some of our other articles, you may have noticed that this is a point that we come back to time and again. It really is that important!

How can you expect to post content that gets people talking if you don’t have a solid idea of what topics they’re interested in?

Social media presents an excellent opportunity to build a connection with your audience, by demonstrating that you’re passionate about the same things that they are, and you know them well enough to know what matters to them.

Instead of posting about the features and benefits of your device (which should take up no more than 10-15% of your feed) you can use social media to start discussions surrounding your industry. For instance, you might post about problems HCPs face in your therapy area.

Have an identifiable voice

Social media is such a special area of marketing because it allows a deeper dive into the personality of your brand. Sure, your website and all your marketing collaterals were designed to your brand guidelines (or should have been, check out our article on the importance of branding), but social media is continuous, and it builds.

Consistency allows you to build an identifiable voice for your brand, almost like creating a tangible, real person. Strong branding like this encourages connection, and therefore makes your brand memorable and recognisable.

The more people see your posts and recognise them, the more likely they will be to engage when the time is right.

Include interactive elements in posts

One way to increase engagement on your social media posts is to include interactive elements, such as polls, questionnaires and scrollable PDFs.

They ask for input or action from your audience, ensuring there is something for them to engage with. Interactions with polls and clicks through to questionnaires etc, all count towards your engagement rate.

Ask questions

Similar to the above, one of the simplest ways to improve engagement on your posts is simply to ask for it. You will probably see that some of the most popular social media accounts tend to end their posts by asking a question.

Essentially, you’re asking viewers to interact and even giving them a starting point. The most success of this tactics is usually seen on posts that encourage a discussion, or even debate. Users will even begin to interact with one another, and your engagement will go through the roof.

Questions can still work, even on posts that don’t spark debate, just as long as the question you ask is related to the topic of the post and is something that people would be happy, even excited, to answer.

Next time you post, why not try starting or ending it with a question? It could start with something like “how do you….” or “what do you think?”.

Interact with users

There’s nothing more off-putting to social media users than accounts that “post and ghost”. These accounts will post their content, and then forget about it, failing to respond to any of the comments they get.

Responding to comments shows that your brand cares and appreciates when people engage with you. When a brand ignores comments, it can seem quite cold.

Make sure you respond to your feedback, both positive and negative, and get involved in the conversation.

Interact with other accounts

The clue is in the name: social media. Use your platforms to interact with other accounts by following them and liking and commenting on their posts.

Not only will this extend your reach, by getting you in front of people who potentially haven’t seen you before, it begins to build relationships.

When you interact with people’s posts, they’re appreciative and may naturally feel inclined to return the favour. People are much more likely to engage with the posts of people they feel they have some kind of relationship with, even if it is just from commenting on each other’s posts.

You can also collaborate with other accounts to increase your engagement. For instance, hosting webinars and cross-posting not only creates opportunities to engage with one another’s posts, but you can also capitalise on their audience.

Use the platform as it was intended, rather than secluding your brand and avoiding conversations.

Share your team

Sharing images of your team is one of the quickest ways to boost your social media engagement, and it can be really easy to do.

Your team are the people your audience interacts with every day. They’re the friendly faces who serve as a remind that there are people behind the screens, making the social media posts happen.

Additionally, posts with pictures of people in them tend to perform better as they are perceived as more trustworthy. Just having a picture of a member of your team in your post could multiple the amount of engagement you receive.

Why not try posting about your team’s achievements or even get some quotes from them to use?

Keep up with the data

Data is your best friend when it comes to successful social media. You’ll probably find that all of the answers to your questions are contained in your analytics.

It couldn’t be easier to check your engagement rates, and therefore, begin to establish a pattern of what posts perform well, and which ones aren’t as popular.

For instance, if you find that posting PDF slideshows gets people liking and commenting, the smart thing to do would be to make more of them. In the same way, if you find that posting about a certain topic isn’t seeing much success, you shouldn’t waste your time posting about it in the future.

If you’re curious and would like to know more, you can check out our article on the importance of social media reporting.

Social media success!

Increasing social media engagement isn’t easy, but it’s totally worth it. You could end up with a social media account that works like a well-oiled machine, constantly working to provide you with leads.

Hopefully this article has given you all you need to know to get started, but if not, why not bring in the experts?

We specialise is all types of Medical Device digital marketing, including social media. If you’d like to have a chat, just fill in the contact form below.

Social media from Podymos

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality social campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.

How to maximise attendance at your Medical Device webinar

Are you searching for ways to maximise attendance to your MedTech webinars? Have you been struggling to find an article that provides you with clear, actionable insights? Well, we were too, so we decided to write one ourselves.

This article promises to talk you through the best ways to maximise attendance to your webinars.

Choosing your topic and your speakers

The content of your webinar is the first and most important thing that will encourage registrations and attendance. Who is speaking? What topic will interest your audience?

Picking engaging speakers is critical when planning a successful webinar, so be sure to invite people at the top of their field and who know how to present to an audience. If you have some more well-known candidates, it’s good practice to have them present at the beginning and end of the webinar, so that you can start and end strong.

Make sure that your speakers come from a range of backgrounds to ensure they bring a variety of different opinions and experiences to the table. You should consider picking panellists with opposing views, to spark debates between speakers which may encourage your audience to attend. 

To really drive in those numbers, make sure that your webinar is topical. You will want to talk about the newest ideas and biggest challenges in your audience’s field as that is what they’re looking for information about. A product demonstration won’t cut it in these days. Surgical challenges (or something similar) will bring a much bigger crowd.

How to promote your webinar on social media

The next important step in maximising Medical Device webinar attendance is to spread the word about your webinar by optimising your promotion.

Optimising webinar promotion on social media

Social media is a great way to increase awareness of your webinar. The best way to do this is to target your audience. Simply posting a registration link on Twitter is not going to make the cut.  

Picking the right channel to showcase your webinar could be the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful webinar. Is your target audience Health Care Professionals or end consumers? If the first, then you should promote your webinar on LinkedIn, the second, maybe Instagram. 

Having a good idea of where your audience resides across social media platforms is critical when promoting your webinar on social media. You may need to research this in order to find the right demographic for you but if you’re not sure check out our article on choosing the right social media platform.

You should send out at least three social media posts to promote the event. The first post should be at least 2-3 weeks before the event, the second post the week before and the third on the day of.

The posts should contain relevant information about the webinar including: 

• The title of the webinar 
• The date
• The time 
• The names and titles of the speakers and chair 
• The topics 
• And most importantly the sign-up link

This post comes best in the form of a catchy GIF, as they spread information quickly and in a way that is memorable. Make sure you tag your speakers in the post, as well as any organisations you have partnered with. This will maximise the post’s reach. 

Your second social media post should go out a week or a day before your webinar, depending on when the first post went out. You need to make it clear to your audience that there’s a limited amount of time left to sign-up. It would be best to inject some urgency into this post by, for example having “1 week to go”, or “1 day left to sign-up” in large letters.

Your final social media post should be a quick reminder a few hours before the webinar. Whether the post is a static feed or grid post, or a story is entirely up to you, but trying a variety of post types can help you to see which posts work the best. LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook stories have features such as countdown timers, which are great tools to boost engagement. 

You could offer attendance certificates as another way to boost attendance. Offering certificates that attendees can post on social media and other platforms will act as an incentive for registrants to actually attend the event. Plus, if they do post the certificate on social media, it will be shared with all their connections and could generate more interest for future webinars.

Optimising email campaigns for webinars 

Email campaigns are great for sharing your event and getting sign-ups. It’s important to note that while email does have some benefits to maximising your registration, it’s limited to the number of people on your mailing list.

Expanding your mailing list can help to spread awareness of your webinar. One way to do this is to collaborate with a non-competing MedTech company or group in the industry (this could be a society, journal, or patient group, depending on your audience). Hosting the webinar together will allow you both to capitalise on each other’s contacts and increase attendance.

When creating a webinar email campaign, you should include all the information listed above in a personalised email, as well as a calendar invite. The calendar invite allows the recipient to add the event to their online calendars.  You can set these calendar invites to also send calendar and phone notifications to ensure your attendees arrive on time.

Research has shown that sending up to three emails to the people on your mailing list who haven’t yet registered can increase your email open rate by 70%. Follow-up emails are great as potential registrants may have missed the first email or have forgotten to sign-up and need reminding.

Finally, if you’re trying to gain registrations for a whole webinar series, you should create two more campaigns for those who attended and those who didn’t. Firstly, you should thank them for registering, and then you should provide details of the next upcoming webinar.

How to keep people watching your webinar 

It’s all well and good getting people to attend your webinar, but how do you ensure that they stay? Haven’t we all joined a webinar only to watch as the number of guests in the room slowly drop off one by one? Here at Podymos, we swear by the following to retain your attendees.

Pre-webinar rituals

Before your webinar starts, you may want to do a small practice run-through with your speakers and chair, so everyone knows what to expect and you can answer any questions from your speakers. This would also be a good chance for you to check the speaker audio and visual components, as nothing will disappoint a viewer more than dodgy audio and a blurry picture. 

Run through your speakers’ presentations and media in a practice session to make sure there are no surprise problems during their talks. Microphone and camera checks can be a lifesaver so always remember to do them before going live. We normally do this 20-30 minutes before a webinar goes live. The end result will be much more polished and therefore engaging, encouraging attendees to stay online.

How to keep your webinar on time

Timing is everything when it comes to webinars, so make sure not to let your speakers go on for too long.

If your webinar is too short it will limit the amount of content that you can present, but if it’s too long, you’ll lose the attention of your audience. Research has shown that 60 minutes is the best length for a webinar, so you should aim to keep your webinar under an hour. 

To break this down further, you could follow a structure for your webinar similar to this: 

1. 5 minutes: Introduction. The chair welcomes everyone to the webinar and introduces the speakers. 
2. 15 minutes: Presentation from speaker one. This should be your strongest speaker.  
3. 15 minutes: Presentation from speaker two. 
4. 15 minutes: Presentation from speaker three: This should be your second strongest speaker.
5. 10 minutes: A Q&A session led by the chair where all the speakers contribute.

Alternatively, you may opt for a more fluid structure for your webinar, where the content is more discussion based rather than presentation based. This is a great way to cover a range of different topics and opinions within a short space of time. It works best when you have a great moderator who knows how to keep moving the conversation in the right direction and manage the discussion.

Get the most out of your webinars

Webinars are a great tool to help people become more familiar with your brand and show off your knowledge and expertise. If done correctly, they can significantly benefit your company’s reputation online and offline, so make sure you get the most out of your webinar by following our top tips.

For more of our blogs about webinars, check out the below articles: 

• How much does a Medical Device webinar cost in 2022? 
• 12 tips for running Medical Device webinars in 2022 
• The top 10 mistakes people make when hosting healthcare webinars 

At Podymos we can run your webinar from start to finish so don’t be afraid to reach out to us if you have any more questions or want more advice on running MedTech webinars. Fill in the contact form below.