This week’s Help This Hound question is from Winthrop Morgan of Bethesda, Maryland:
“How would you raise awareness of a government agency’s comparative effectiveness summary guides for clinicians?
“A well-known and respected U.S. Government agency has a program which distills the findings from high-quality research into short, comprehensive Summary Guides for clinicians. The guides provide reliable and practical data that can inform, but do not attempt to influence, physician therapy decisions. To date, nine guides have been produced, ranging in subject areas from comparing oral medications for adults with type 2 diabetes to off-label use of atypical antipsychotic drugs. The guides are available, without charge, in print, pdf, html, and .mp3. Each is about four pages long.
“Recently, clinicians involved in family/general practice were asked if they are aware of these resources. They are not. When contacted by telephone and shown the guides over the Internet, they approved of the content and design, and said they’re interested in receiving them.
“The agency has a small marketing budget of less than $150,000 to promote awareness of these materials. What ideas do your Hounds have on how to best use the this money to market the guides?”
I have been making a ton of podcasts and downloadable books and seminars, even yoga classes for this generation of web savvy clients. We have found that it creates a buzz passed on by email and twitter/facebook type applications. After the initial cost of digitizing it, it’s free advertising. You can attach these links to every piece of correspondence.
I would say produce some guick video guides and place them on the popular web video hosting sites with links back to the government sites would be pretty effective. Promote that people can download them as pdf files. You don’t have to even use a camera, you can make up 4 or 5 slide presentations in PowerPoint and saved as a movie, add a little music or see if you can read the copy into your computer. Make sure you keyword the description and title, add a link and you should get some traffic.
Do an email blast to as many health sites as you can offering free publications that they can place on their site. Everyone is looking for content.
Set up a web site with the copy of each book on a page, plus the pdf download. Google loves good relevelant copy.
Start by giving those PDFs and MP3s to every relevant professional association for the association to provide to its members. This is viral marketing at its finest, and costs zip! The associations will be delighted, too, since they are always looking for more member benefits to provide, as inexpensively as possible. It doesn’t get more inexpensive than free.
The same is true for every relevant publication and website, for each of them to use as bonuses to bring more traffic. “Visit our site and get a free…”
Could start with giving the link to the agency in this newsletter.
Thanks!