Friday Five Roundup: From Amazon's move into pharma to a dentist soccer coach

1
CNBC

Amazon's Move Into Pharma Could be a Game Changer: same-day prescription delivery, orders via Alexa



Amazon’s interest in the prescription drug business as ripe for disruption takes a huge leap forward with the announcement that the e-commerce giant is buying online pharmacy PillPack.

Read the article on cnbc.com>

2
Quartz

AT&T May Have What It Needs to Challenge Google's Advertising Business


AT&T announced on June 25, it plans to buy ad-tech firm and Google competitor AppNexus, in a deal reportedly valued around $1.6 billion (paywall). The acquisition is meant to strengthen AT&T’s ad business and make its TV advertising more competitive against digital offerings.

Read the article on qz.com>

Digital Marketing Terms Decoded - June Edition


By: Mira Rawady


In this edition of Digital Marketing Terms Decoded, we will focus on the Google Analytics terms and metrics that are important for your digital marketing knowledge. The glossary of Google Analytics terms continues to expand but we're here to introduce you to the basic ones you need to know to start building your marketing strategy. You may have heard of these terms before, but their purpose and definition might not be completely clear to you just yet. Don't sweat it, here are 5 new digital marketing terms decoded.

A monthly series of explanations to lingo and fads in the digital marketing space.


Friday Five Roundup: From the need of business education for dentists to traits of digital marketing leaders

1
Dentistry IQ

The Desperate Need for Business Education in Dentistry



When I talk with other dental professionals, they agree: something is missing in their practices. I'm talking about the business of dentistry. I've had the honor of working with hundreds of practices through my 26-year career, and it’s clear there’s a huge lack of business education in dentistry.

Read the article on dentistryiq.com>

2
Forbes

Six Traits All Great Digital Marketing Leaders Possess


When hiring for the director level or above, a majority of companies still struggle to identify the set of traits that characterize good digital marketing leaders. Some place such weight on business-sector knowledge that marketing leadership skills are deprioritized. From being around both great leaders and average leaders, here are the six traits that the great ones have in common.

Read the article on forbes.com>

Friday Five Roundup: Social media strategies for branding & dentists

1
Dentistry IQ

How to Kick-Start the Social Media Strategy of Your Dental Practice



The social media guidelines that will help you with your marketing plan and brand awareness. Engage with customers, embrace new strategies, and boost your competitiveness!

Read the article on dentistryiq.com>

2
Forbes

Why The IHOP Name Change? Because Hotcakes Aren't Selling Like Hotcakes


IHOP gained some new attention for a stodgy old brand. And it seems to be positioning itself to better serve consumers throughout a day that extends past any reasonable pancake hour. That’s especially the case if the social-media blabbing by its own workers is true about how the new b stands for burgers—that most beloved foodstuff of Americans and others around the world.

Read the article on forbes.com>

3 Things To Think About When Designing Your Website



By: Mira Rawady


Designing a new website? Don't know where to start? Successful web design is based on various factors that may or may not directly appear on your screen. Naturally, aesthetics and visual appeal are essential for design, but it's also important to keep user experience, content management and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind when building your website. It's hard to balance designing for originality, clarity, and analytics without knowing what to prioritize first.

There are several ways to boost your new website's success – the possibilities are seemingly endless. For the purposes of this article, we have selected 3 main areas to focus on when designing your website.

  1. Navigation & Content


  2. These two key elements are what define user perspective and experience. The easier it is for users to navigate through your website and get the information they seek, the more encouraged they are to explore it further. Web layout acts as a playground for users to experience, and building a pleasurable playground involves a balance between simplicity and captivity.

    Website design is so much more than what appears on a screen. For online visitors, what they see and how convenient their experience is determines whether they stay or go. That decision only takes a few seconds to make – almost as soon as they get on the site, so it's important to make that first impression great!

    When it's time to navigate through a website, choosing from a ton of options and links can be overwhelming for many users. Navigation design is all about helping visitors get from one point to another. Keeping the navigation menu in a fixed place, usually at the top of every page, is a popular design trend that allows visitors to navigate your (entire) website from whichever page they happen to be on. 'Sticky' navigation bars improve usability and can reduce browsing time by up to 22%. It's a simple way to make sure visiting users can navigate at ease and have all options available at all times.

    Navigating through pages means that users are absorbing a lot of content, so keeping that content clear and straightforward goes a long way. To incorporate concise and complete content, accompany text with photos and other media to make things easier on the eyes and avoid having your pages look like unappealing blocks of words. Ideally, you could even give each service, product, or call to action a subpage to divide the content and keep it at an adequate amount per page.

    A visual strategy to grab customers' attention and provide them with direct information is to consider including a feature video (or infographics) on your website's homepage. Videos are processed 60,000 times faster by our brains compared to text and allow visitors to effortlessly understand key points without having to read heavy blocks of content upon arrival. It's easier to absorb visual media before moving on to text. Here are some free visual content tools!

  3. Layout & Responsiveness


  4. Consistency throughout your website regarding format, background, color schemes, and typefaces has a positive impact on user experience. But fear not, this does not necessarily limit your design to a single layout theme. A good way to balance creativity and simplicity is to design different layouts for specific types of pages on your website. For example, your home page layout could differ from informational pages, photo galleries, inquiry form pages, and other types of content or calls to action. Depending on how similar content is thematically, you could change up the layout for different types of information to keep things fresh.

    Designing a responsive web interface is another key part of building a successful website. Responsiveness means that the web pages and data should load quickly and the website layout should automatically adapt to the screen size of whatever device the user is accessing it on.

    Who would want to switch from their phone to their laptop just because the website won't load? 64% of mobile web users abandon pages if they don't load within 10 seconds. In order to provide a great user experience, your site needs to be compatible with different devices and browsers that a visitor may be using. Remember, convenience is key, and you want to keep your website as accessible as possible to avoid losing users' interest.

    95% of adults primarily use their smartphones to access information. Building a website that isn't mobile-friendly risks losing a large audience and would simply be incomplete. Since user experience is a top priority when designing a website, dedicating time and resources to your site's accessibility is very important. There are different ways you can do this:

    • Implement a flexible, responsive design structure that resizes content and shuffles everything around to fit the screen parameters of whichever device your visitor is choosing to use.
    • Add alt text tags in html (alternative text tags) to images so mobile users can still understand what's on the page even if some visual media isn't responsive or loaded. Alt text is a text description that can be added to an image's HTML tag and appears instead of images that won't display. (This may be a sloppy solution that doesn't incorporate the complete web design, but it could still work as a temporary fix!)
    • Invest in platform-specific designs that have different layouts for every device. Responsiveness doesn't necessarily mean that a website should look identical on all platforms, and accessibility can be accomplished with different layouts for each device. In fact, squeezing everything in on a small screen doesn't always work out well and having device-specific website platforms assures that both functionality and aesthetics are at full potential.


    For more on why your website should be mobile-friendly, read this.

  5. SEO-consciousness


  6. SEO plays an important part in the ongoing improvement of your brand's online presence and could put you ahead of competitors when it comes to your website's visibility. Having your website pop up amongst the first few search results in Google Search and other search engines is one of the best ways to reach your target clients first and build an online audience.

    Less than 10% of people advance to the second page of Google Search results when doing online searches. This percentage may seem very low, but ask yourself: why would anyone advance past the first page? In most cases, search engine results provide internet users with what they need in the first few results. Browsing is quick and effortless, so finding your website should be too!

    Initiating your website with good SEO is all about search relevancy, content quality, linking, keyword use, descriptions, title tags, and other features you can explore here.

    Some key points for a good SEO start are:

    • Having each page of your website target a specific primary search keyword and multiple secondary keywords.
    • Optimizing several pages for different keywords as opposed to dedicating one page for too many keywords.
    • Using your keywords in relevant content and avoiding “stuffing” them into text for the sake of just including as many keywords as possible.
    • Using H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags to specify which keywords are primary and which are secondary.
    • Using long tail keyword variations you'd like to rank for.


    The main point, especially for initial SEO, is making sure each page has Google-friendly content. Data shows that pages with 2,000+ words of content typically rank higher in Google search than pages with short, light content. You should also make sure content engages and helps users get what they want out of their search and website visit. Think of content simply as the answer to what someone is looking for!


Your content and keywords reflect on how beneficial your website is to people searching for what they need, and everyone wants to get results as quickly and easily as possible. SEO not only puts you in the good graces of Google Search, but also helps you connect to more users and boost your website's success. How important can design and content be if they aren't attracting enough viewers?

Related article: Digital Marketing Terms Decoded

Friday Five Roundup: Social media content to new research in dental and digital marketing

1
KNect365

How the Facebook News Feed Update Will Impact Patients & Healthcare Companies



The epidemic of “fake news” so rampant on Facebook has affected health information just as much as politics. Without question, limiting the amount of this potentially damaging content that patients see is a good thing.

Read the article on knect365.com>

2
Hootsuite

The Ideal Social Media Post Length: A Guide for Every Platform


There’s no such thing as too much engagement on social media. Marketers can always use more likes, shares, video views, and comments. And integral to driving that engagement is nailing the length of your message. This article is a curation of research around ideal character counts (not to be confused with character limits) for posts and other types of content on different social media platforms.

Read the article on hootsuite.com>

9 Digital Marketing Stats You Should Know


By: Johanna Bannis


When using digital marketing, there are many components to consider, such as how quickly your business is found after a quick Google search or how to effectively engage with your clients in an ever-changing digital world. We've taken the liberty of gathering some useful statistics and suggestions that we hope you'll find interesting.

Why not make sure your digital marketing skills are top-notch?

  1. More Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers. According to Google, we are now in the era of mobile-first indexing, where a business' mobile website is displayed first instead of the desktop website. Indexing is the organization of web pages which have been processed according to their location, tags and descriptions in order to make them discoverable paying attention to new and recently updated pages. Essentially, mobile-indexing, is easier and quicker for users to find what they're looking for in a less confusing and more direct manner.


  2. 48% of mobile consumers who visited a website that was not mobile-friendly, assumed that the company just didn't care about their business. This is a staggeringly-high statistic, which begs the question - is your business mobile-optimized? If not, consider taking some steps to address this, as this has an apparent reflection on your business. Read more on why your practice should be more mobile-friendly.

Friday Five Roundup: From dentist who owns John Lennon's tooth to blogging in the age of AI

1
Dental Economics

A Simple Guide to Email Marketing for Your Practice



Email is an essential marketing tool for informing your current patients and attracting new ones. Using some strategies for patient email marketing just might help your practice improve, grow, and increase revenue.

Read the article on dentaleconomics.com>

2
HubSpot

How Your Blog Needs to Evolve in the Age of AI-Powered Voice Search


As search moves towards voice, how people discover and consume content is changing. Here's how to prepare your blog for AI-Powered search.

Read the article on hubspot.com>