Mediaboss Marketing

Safdarjung Hospital. For representational purpose only (Image: PTI)

Even before the coronavirus broke out, most of us dreaded a hospital visit. The unpleasant, and sometimes sickening, odour of cleaning agents, sad, desperate faces, busy and rude staff, brusque doctors, long queues and hefty billsa visit to the hospital was best avoided unless you worked there.

Hospitals continue to be busy places, COVID-19 or not. Physicians, interns, nurses, other staff, patients and their families, visitors and pharma representatives, constitute a big captive audience for a firm looking to position some offerings to them, especially those in healthcare marketing.

Untapped captive audience

There is an opportunity for hospitals or brands to engage and get noticed by this huge audience but none of the hospitals I know have made use of this opportunity.

Healthcare centres should plan to have their own media, including social and digital, to get the attention of such a big captive audience, many of whom spend a lot of time waiting in hospitals.

Such centres can use their physical space for advertising and marketing, not necessarily for their services. Pharma companies and even FMCG brands can use this media for experiential marketing and building awareness about their social responsibility activities.

And, they can generate some revenue from this as well. Owned media is something a business can control, unlike TV or newspaper ads. It is like a billboard in the land owned by the hospital and not like a media article that is paid for or shared through a public relations (PR) agency.

Hospitals can make use of all potential spaces such as the buildings, inside walls, garden area, ambulances, and also virtual spaces such as websites, social media and mobile platforms for planning their own media.

The ambulances and physical facilities provide the highest potential because of the higher propensity to be seen and can be viewed like outdoor media.

Physical spaces could be used for signboards, garden signages, interior digital signage, floor and wall graphics, information kiosks with touch screens, and the likes.

Advances in virtual and augmented reality could be made use for advertising complicated services or for cosmetic services.

Space is the medium, own it

Hospitals can carry corporate brand messages in spaces all that is within their controlentry gate, main hall, consulting rooms, cash counters, labs, waiting rooms, canteen, elevators, and parking areas.

Everything a clinic uses for communication can be potential owned media. Dont exclude the telephone lines that must be receiving hundreds of calls every day where the brand music could be played instead of boring ring tones. It can also be used to announce the latest offerings, services or a recently acquired certification.

If you are in the healthcare sector, start by looking around on your way to the office. Take a tour of your premises and search for blank walls that can offer potential views. Each space and even the whole building is a branding opportunity.

As a healthcare executive, you must identify the appropriate message to engage the target audience, depending on the mode of delivery. You cant have a long message on a large billboard or WhatsApp. You may want to promote a new service, a partnership with a big healthcare brand or research centre and so on.

Engage with patients, community

Perhaps you may want to address your value proposition, and why you are great at that, and how patients are having a different experience.

Messages could also be about medical camps and community engagements as part of your CSR efforts even if you are not obliged to do the mandatory 2 percent spending under the CSR laws.

Use the right brand attributes such as identity and colour. Use technology to make an advertisement a two-way street, with engaging conversations with the prospects.

The coronavirus pandemic offers a chance to start education modules for your patients and telemedicine forays as well.

Try to balance design and marketing since it is a healthcare business. In-your-face messaging can put off people, restrained and understated works well. The central theme should always be getting patients well fast. Dont go overboard just because media is available for free. Too many jazzy spots will increase the fear that you will charge more.

Talking to the doctors who are on the rolls or visiting can also be done via messages on mission, vision, values, certification, new doctors joining, etc.

Doctors are the key to helping patients get well faster and aligning them with the vision is important. Treating patients like customers is a value that needs to be built into the staff. The success of marketing depends on this strategic aspect and not just clever ads.

Once the role of media in addressing various audiences is identified, plan for the right content. It is better to invest more in content marketing when the media costs are much lower.

Specialised communication is the key and there are specialised agencies like BioQuest that can come to the aid. If done right, healthcare businesses can create a lasting impact with a much lower cost of marketing.

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Here is how you can use marketing effectively in healthcare business - Moneycontrol

Looking to get a handle on the latest, emerging trends, and what they could mean for your marketing efforts?

This will help today, Meta has published a new cultural trends report, a 57-page overview of the latest, evolving conversation trend shifts, based on billions of online posts and comments from across its apps.

Metas report could actually be the most comprehensive of its type, incorporating some 600,000 unique conversation topics, based on chatter among its more than 3 billion users. The report incorporates 15 months of conversation data, and 21 months of hashtag use, to identify these rising trends and shifts, which could be highly valuable as a planning document.

And the broader changes in societal attitudes and approaches in the period have been significant.

As explained by Meta:

The physical, mental and spiritual effects of the coronavirus pandemic have been profound. In our latest global foresight survey, we found out that the future aint what it used to be: 37% of the respondents say the pandemic spurred them to reevaluate their purpose and priorities in life, while 41% said that if they had a do-over, theyd choose a different career. And 65% now expect more out of work and life.

The guide includes key insights into the latest sub-trends within each topic, and related discussion.

While it also includes charts and data notes on changes and shifts over time.

You can download the full report here, and its well worth reading, while Meta has also published this one-page overview of the key themes.

Read the original here:
Meta Publishes New Report into Evolving Conversation Trends and Interests [Infographic] - Social Media Today

Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India has said that the Customised Events Report (CER) for News and Special Interest genre will only be shared with the channel concerned and will not be visible in the YUMI analytics software.

This was stated by BARC India CEO Nakul Chopra while addressing a Q&A session during a webinar organised by the rating agency on February 17. The webinar was held to educate subscribers about the Augmented Data Reporting Standards (ADRS) for news and special interest genre channels.

"It will not be shared. It will only be shared with the channel whose report it is. It's up to them who they want to share it with. The report will not be visible in the YUMI database," Chopra said while answering a question if the CER will be shared with other channels.

BARC has defined CER as reporting of an event in a single day in a financial year. It will issue three non-transferable CERs per quarter to each channel based on their specific request. These reports would be based on unrolled data for events such as special news events, and show premieres.

Unlike the unrolled data which cannot be used publicly, the broadcasters can use the CERs for social/marketing communications and sharing with trade/media. The CERs will be made available to subscribers from Week 14 data release.

On the confidentiality of CERs, BARC India Head Client Partnership & Revenue Function Aaditya Pathak said that the need to seek CER will only arise if a channel wants to socialise/promote or go public with the data for a particular day or programme. "Any which ways, the broadcasters would have the unrolled database, and they can look at their own estimates. Therefore, the reason to ask a CER would only arise if they would go out the whole hog," he added.

Queried whether subscribers can request CER for past data, Pathak responded in the negative. "No, because we are not releasing unrolled estimates for the past data," he added.

On being asked if BARC will provide a list of channels that are mapped with genre classification, BARC India Chief of Measurement Science & Business Analytics Dr. Derrick Gray said that the exercise to classify the channels will be done every quarter based on the past 13 weeks data. "BARC will reach out to all those channels to let them know which ones are falling into special interest genres," he noted.

In his response, Pathak said BARC will inform respective channels as to why they have been classified as special interest channels, "We will discuss with the respective channels and inform them as to why they are of special interest genre. In the entire currency database, it doesn't matter and there is no identification per se."

One of the subscribers asked the BARC executives as to how can broadcasters use unrolled database for generating insights with limited programming information about the other channels. To this, Dr. Gray said, "They have the other chance to report together in the rolled database that will give them an understanding of how they stack up against the competition. It's the same four-week theory that's being rolled, so it's a level playing field against the audience estimates of all channels."

He also noted that the unrolled database is meant to help channels understand the impact of programming decisions on their audiences and that would be fully visible to them in that database.

Responding to a question about the evaluation of campaigns for niche channels, Dr. Gray said that the pre- and post-evaluation will be done on the rolling average database. He added that both pre and post evaluations will be equivalent as both are being done on the same average datasets. "This is effectively just a re-estimation of the audience estimates that are released for planning both pre and post."

Read more news about (internet advertising India, internet advertising, advertising India, digital advertising India, media advertising India)

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Customised Events Report of news & niche channels will not be visible in YUMI: BARC - Exchange4Media

In this part of the askST education series, Senior Education Correspondent Sandra Davie responds to two questions from parents on the Singapore University of Social Sciences.

A: It is admirable that young people such as your daughter aspire to work to bring about positive changes in people's lives.

I am not sure what you mean by "average grades", but first, I want to make the point that admission to universities is not based on academic grades alone.

All the local universities, including SUSS, use a more holistic admission process where they look beyond academic grades. This is especially so for courses such as social work, early childhood education and nursing where the universities also look for interest and aptitude in the field.

For entry into SUSS, the minimum requirement is two A-level passes for the part-time programme. The selection is a bit more stringent for the full-time programme, and better grades are required.

SUSS uses a four-stage selection process for its full-time programmes, which comprises a 30-minute essay, a 12-minute cognitive test, a group discussion and an individual or cluster interview.

The interviews are used to gauge applicants' interest in social work. Here, your daughter's involvement in voluntary work will put her in good stead.

SUSS' four-year Bachelor of Social Work is a direct honours programme designed to develop a student's knowledge and skills as positive change agents in society. It also prepares students for indirect social work in the areas of social policy, planning and evaluation.

SUSS has done away with the usual lecture-tutorials way of teaching and, instead, uses blended learning, which means all the materials are available online before the start of the course.

Students usually go through the PowerPoint slides, the study guide and the chunked lecture recordings before class. The classes, usually with about 40 students, are meant for students to clarify what they could not understand from the materials.

The lecture will also use case studies and other means to illustrate how theories are applied in practice.

Most SUSS lecturers are practitioners in the field or practitioners-turned-academics. There are usually robust discussions in class.

Continued here:
askST: With average grades, can my daughter make it to university to study social work? - The Straits Times

Heres a potentially handy update Twitter has today added a new option to pin DM chats, with the capacity to pin up to six chats at once to the top of your inbox.

As you can see in the above sequence, now, if you swipe to the right on any chat, youll see a new pin option appear, which will enable you to keep that exchange at the top of the stream, even as new DMs come in.

Which could be a great way to keep in touch with your closest friends in the app, without having to scroll through every time you want to send a new message though you can also search your DMs by username, a feature that Twitter added back in 2019, while its also been experimenting with a more advanced DM search capacity which would enable you to conduct keyword searches for DM content as well.

So in some ways, its probably a bit late for this to be truly valuable but where it could be particularly helpful is in conducting customer service via Twitter DM, with the ability to keep in-progress chats with customers at the top of your inbox, ensuring that you remain aware of what needs to be addressed, while also helping to keep tabs on such without having to remember individual usernames.

That could be a very handy addition to your process, while separating your key chats from your regular messages could also serve as a good reminder to stay in touch with your main contacts, and maintain discussion in the app.

While its not the primary function, messaging is an important connective element on Twitter, especially for brands looking to manage exchanges with customers and clients via tweet, which can often include sensitive information, like order details or accounts. Indeed, according to Twitters own research, while 73% of Twitter users are likely to tweet at a brand to get a response, 52% are more likely to DM a brand account when it comes to more private info.

It pays to give this element focus, and to keep this channel open for such queries, and the capacity to pin selected chats could be helpful in managing these exchanges, and ensuring that you respond in a timely manner.

Or, you can just separate out your ongoing conversations with your best friends, so you can more easily share the latest memes.

Its not a game-changer, but its another handy addition for Twitters DM tools.

See the article here:
Twitter Adds Option to Pin DM Chats in Order to Keep Track of Key Conversations - Social Media Today