Health Care
Consumers and their supplements, part two
In my previous blog post, I mentioned some information regarding interesting new findings on dietary supplements; cautionary findings in particular. Potential risks are more understood these days, tipping the risk/benefit scale from “it can’t hurt” to “maybe I better think twice.”
Has that message reached the “common consumer”? Are people really concerned about potential side effects of their daily intake of vitamins?
Survey says, “yes”.
Consumers and their supplements, part one
Europeans eat nutritious food. Americans pop pills. Or, that’s what some of my industry friends on the continent like to think. Are we really that bad? A quick fix for a bad diet?
I’ve been a supplement taker on and off for years, albeit randomly. Someone sneezes on the train, grab some Vitamin C. Have leg cramps, reach for the Calcium. I’m not sure what prompted a month of sipping noni juice – maybe I was feeling exotic.
I’ll be speaking this year at Focus on the Future , and wanted to “supplement” my company’s consumer food behavior survey with one on vitamins/minerals/herbals. What do people look for? Are they loyal to a brand? Are they faddists or do they swear by particular nutrients? And does anything worry them about taking supplements? Continue reading
Dissecting Thanksgiving
Hopefully everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. So, what did you feast upon? 
Thanks to the ability to monitor online trends, we can pick apart not only what we cooked (minute by minute, it turns out) but how the digital revolution we’re all experiencing gets played out on the most American of holidays. A look at the top 50 search terms on “how to make” for Thanksgiving food items and their patterns, state-by-state, is a blast. Take a look!
Matching your advertising expenditures to your target’s media consumption habits
It’s that time of year… everyone’s planning their budgets for 2010. We all hope and pray that the recession will be over by then, but in the meantime most organizations are lean and mean. Just today eMarketer reported that in order to improve overall marketing effectiveness, 70% of marketers are moving budget from traditional to digital media.
So is it time for you to create a high impact online marketing program? You know that your targets are online, but where do I start?
Two primary ways come to mind – targeted media buys and search marketing.
Active Marketing to a Passive Marketplace
Health care is needs based. That means, for the most part, the only time a consumer will look for health-related information is when they or a loved one has a concern or problem. Then, two things happen simultaneously: they dial a doctor with one hand while typing in search phrases with the other. And that’s where you, as a marketer for a health care facility or provider, have a huge advantage in gaining the attention of this once passive individual. By increasing your SEO activities, you can be in the right place at the right time. We’re often surprised by how under-utilized SEO is in health care marketing. It’s low-hanging fruit with a high propensity to help you become a trusted resource in a time a need.
From there, your relevant content provides you the opportunity to capture data, establish a relationship and create moments of intimacy where your relevant outreach earns trust and encourages patronage.
Healthcare 2.0
Imagine being able to go online and have access to instruments that could measure and transmit your health data directly to your physician. Imagine healthcare “loyalty” programs, that give incentives to patients for taking their medications regularly; all recorded, transmitted, tracked, and awarded online. It’s all technologically possible, and in this article from newscientist.com, you can get a glimpse of the probable future. Medical devices from weight scales to asthma inhalers could soon connect directly to the web. Healthcare professionals will have a less intrusive and disruptive way to monitor patients with chronic conditions. Of course, this all depends on whether a great number of patients will feel comfortable with their health data going online. Companies like IBM, Intel, Google, Kaiser Permanente and the UK’s National Health Service appear to be banking on the fact that we will be increasingly insistent – and comfortable with – transparency.
