Health Aware (19% of UK)

• this group is interested in and are fairly knowledgeable about health matters, more than three in ten say that they are always striving for a healthier lifestyle
• they have a more stringent approach to eating, being especially likely to avoid chips etc
• they have a more conventional approach to health than most, preferring to stick to common sense rules, and are not particularly interested in keeping up with the latest health advice
• they are happy to take advantage of foods with specific health benefits, such as cholesterol lowering spreads and are more enthusiastic about superfoods than others
• the health aware are more likely to be female than male
• they are also especially prevalent among women in the 35-44 and over-55 age groups
• socio-economic group does not appear to be an important factor determining whether or not a consumer falls into this group
• mostly to be found in London and the south-east

For most health care professionals trying to market their services to this demographic, it’s obvious they don’t need to spend too much time trying to educate this group. Once you have established which of your clients fit this demographic, I recommend that you put most of your energy into reminding them of your services. You don’t want to bore them, but since they are knowledgeable and interested in their health all they’ll need is a gentle nudge at times. Incentives will work especially well with this type of patient. They’ll also want to feel assured that the services you provide have been scientifically proven, i.e. they aren’t interested in the latest fads.

About Cocoon Health

If you’re any of the following… osteopath, physio, massage therapist, pscyhotherapist or you provide some other kind of physical or mental health service we’d like to invite you to join Cocoon Health. It’s a social network focused on health. Use it to market your services online for free and start increasing your referrals today.

There are half a dozen health types that I’d like to share with you. Here is the first. Does it remind you of any of your patients?

Health Freaks (17% of the UK)

• these consumers are keenly interested in everything health related
• they like to keep up to date with the latest health advice (28%), and are always striving for a healthier lifestyle (29%)
• they are confident about how to behave in order to stay healthy, but 26% would still welcome the opportunity to have more regular health checks
• health freaks don’t have a particularly stressful lifestyle and make sure they take time out to relax and unwind
• they also like to have short cuts to healtyh eating, for example, eating superfoods and following the five a day rule for fruit and veg
• health freaks are equally likely to be male or female
• they are also likely to be older consumers but have an above-average representation among men aged 25-34
• approaches that use popular culture and new technology are likely to have the greatest impact on this age group (male 25-34)

Market research from Mintel’s special report: An Ounce of Prevention: Preventing Illness Through Healthy Living

About Cocoon Health

If you’re any of the following… reflexologist , counsellor, yoga instructor, meditation teacher or you provide some other kind of physical or mental health service we’d like to invite you to join Cocoon Health. It’s a social network focused on health. Use it to market your services online for free and start increasing your referrals today.

As you can see from this pie chart, one third of us still don’t really value our health enough to warrant even small changes to our lifestyles that would be beneficial to our wellbeing.

This research was carried out by Mintel in its special report of January 2010: ‘Pie-chart to show attitudes to health in the UK’

Over the coming weeks I will release more information into the characteristics of each of these categories. It will be interesting to see which category you relate to most. I’ll also share with you the demographic profiles of each of these groups etc. You can find out about the first of the groups by clicking on this link: the ‘Health Freaks‘.

For the time being though I thought I’d add a few key points the research carried out by Mintel.

According to Mintel, the Internet is now the most widely-used source of information on all matters related to health and wellbeing. That is not to say it is the most trusted or reliable, simply that far more people search for information on health via the internet than via any other media conduit. Naturally people most often visit government health-related websites os websites such as NHS Choices, whose content they feel they can deem as scientific and impartial. Around three in ten respondents use each of these sources, compared to 13% who use sites run by health charities, and 12% who use internet forums and/or message boards. Women tend to favour government sites, whereas men tend to prefer to use a search engine. Three in ten find it useful to talk to friends and family about health matters and rather fewer than this value advice from their pharmacist. Nearly four in ten sought advice and information from their peers, which included online forums and message boards, as well as talking to friends and family. Just over four in ten women and 35% of men found this helpful.

It’s for these reasons that we have created Cocoon Health, where you can easily share recommendations of the best healthcare professionals with your loved-ones in private. You can even see which professionals recommend one another. Soon we’ll be adding functionality so that healthcare regulators can verify each health professional’s membership of specific industry bodies. The network is home to osteopaths, physios, massage therapists, personal trainers, yoga teachers, gym instructors, doctors and pyschotherapists. Each one takes care of their patients via their Cocoon profile and benefits from the recommendations of their patients and those of other health professionals.

About Cocoon Health

It’s a social network, it’s free to use and it’s growing fast. Make sure you visit our tour page to find out what it means to have your own Cocoon profile today. We have thousands of health care professionals using the network to care for their patients and to increase referrals. It’s the perfect marketing platform for all practitioners, and it’s completely free! So if you’re a doctor, counsellor, therapist or even a zen guru we invite you to create your Cocoon profile today.

Here’s their slideshow to give you a tour of what it’s all about:

The most important thing you can do when building and managing a website is to listen to your userbase.  It’s all too easy to get carried away with cool designs and unnecessarily complicated new features. As a rule web designers and developers should be looking to remove rather than add. Simplicity is king when it comes to design. Don’t add unless you have to. This applies to business as a whole.

Since we’re only a small team at Cocoon Health and we don’t have the resources to create focus groups or individually call all of our users, we rely on social media and surveys to learn about what matters most to them. Creating customer satisfaction surveys that give us clear insights into how our people navigate our site is essential to the development of the network. You want visitors to find what they want instantaneously. Ideally they’ll love the design, find its functionality effortlessly simple and want to spread the word about how great you are. If that happens you’ve succeeded in changing your website from a digital shop-front into a conversion powerhouse that provides you with lots of new leads and gets window-shoppers excited about your services.

Without further ado, I present you with a short-list of do’s and dont’s that can help you design your customer satisfaction survey.

DOs

1. Define exactly what you want to find out. This will inform the kind of questions you ask

2. Have between 2 to 4 questions per page, this will help to shorten the survey

3. Assure users at the start of the survey that you will take the time to properly analyse the data

4. Let them know what you’re going to do with the data and whether they can access the survey’s results and analysis

5. Be honest about how long the survey will take to fill at the start of the survey

6. Doublecheck the logic of your survey. Pay particular attention to questions that follow a previous YES/NO question.

7. Treat your survey as a piece of marketing as well as market research tool. Think about the survey’s branding options and promoting your services to the user

8. Consider incentivising your users to take the survey

9. Ask users to rate your survey’s length and quality. This will help you to improve your survey skills

DON’Ts

1. Use too many questions that require users to type their answer

2. Publicise your survey before you have tested the survey yourself at least twice

3. Users need to see their progress as they complete the survey so don’t forget to include some way of visualising their progress as they answer each question

4. Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes. Users will not take your survey seriously

5. Don’t ask too many questions. If you know what information you are trying to glean from the survey you shouldn’t need more than 30 multiple choice questions to achieve this

If you’d like to see an example of a survey click here. It’s a survey we have created to help us understand how UK health professionals are using the internet to market their services. If you’re a healthcare professional and have a few moments to take the survey we would encourage you to do so. It only takes 5 minutes, consists of 23 multiple choice questions and will raise a number of points that may be of interest to you and your marketing activities.

At Cocoon Health we’re now developing phase 2 of the network. Professionals will soon be able to blog from their Cocoon and target special offers to the network. We’ll be using this survey to make sure we know exactly what our userbase wants.

Our blog will show the survey results so do subscribe to our RSS feed or bookmark our site.

Has anyone had any success promoting your services to local GP surgeries? Do you have any tips how to increase GP referrals? Thanks

The best response was provided by Andre Duquemen of AttractPatientsNow.com. He wrote:

Hello Jays,

I built my business around working with local GPs and work with many clients to help them do the same. Its mainly about making an effort to reach out to them and then not being upset when referrals dont come immediately!

All of this referral building takes time – its all about building relationships rather than getting business. Follow the “know, like, trust” rule always – and remember “slowly, slowly catchy monkey!”

I would get in touch initially with a letter, then follow with a phone call a week or two later. Remember to always ask yourself “what’s in it for them”. GP’s are like every other practitioner – they want to know that they are sending patients to people that are going to be professsional, good at their job and effective with their treatments.

So be professional in your approach, know your stuff and be confident in your abilites.

Its fairly straightforward to do all this, but you probably might find resistance from certain GPs, but thats natural. You only really need a handful of GPs referring patients to you, to make a huge difference in your practice.

Good luck!
Andre

When asked whether it was best to approach the GP or practice manager, Andre gave the following response:

Always the GP where possible! Again, this is about relationship building, not providing services. So the point is to educate your potential referral partners about who you are, what you can do for them and what their next step is.

As i have said previously, too many people approach referral building as a one off and give up after one attempt.

This isnt short term, its building and establishing relationships in your community – think of yourself as doing a great service for your community, become amazing at what you do and give incredible value and care – before you know it a few GP’s will come to see you as a valued resource and will refer patients to you.

Good luck!
Andre

For those of you not yet familiar with Cocoon Health, I strongly encourage you to create your free Cocoon profile so that you can start marketing your services. With your Cocoon you can connect with clients and fellow health professionals. Using the recommendation system you can build strategic partnerships with other healthcare practitioners to increase patient referrals. The best of all recommendations to gain is one from you local GP. The GP’s patients will be able to see that the GP recommended you just by logging onto the network. This is a very powerful referral tool so visit Cocoon Health, create your Cocoon and start getting recommendations on the network.

At Cocoon Health we’re planning for the next big push in the network’s development to make the experience for all our users the very best it can be. We’ve now finished defining the next phase of development which will see the introduction of an advertising and blogging system for health professionals.

So, for a small premium you can expect your Cocoon to host your own advertising system and blog. You’ll be able to create ads that will be circulated throughout the network. Your ads will be seen by clients you’re already connected to as well as other prospective clients in your area who show an interest in the treatments you provide.

All users will soon find new aggregated pages. Imagine a page dedicated to each therapy. Take acupuncture for example. On the acupuncture page you’ll be able to see which of your connections recommends an acupuncturist, you’ll see if any acupuncturists in your area are advertising any special offers, and you’ll see posts written by acupuncturists with their Cocoon blogs and any photos of videos uploaded by health professionals that relate to acupuncture.

Cocoon Health is fast becoming the one-stop-shop for professionals wanting to market their services and for people looking for treatment from professionals they can trust at an excellent rate.

But all that’s just the site’s engine! We’re also working with brand and design consultants to give the network a face lift. The initial designs are fantastic and much more colourful than the current version.

We’ll keep you posted on all of these developments via our blog so make sure you bookmark this page or sign up to the RSS feed via your RSS reader.

Whilst Google constantly updates its rules and practices to make sure that big publishers don’t find ways to beat the system and create an unfair advantage against other smaller sites, the main reason why Google has such strict guidelines is really for their userbase. A lot of SEO is pure common sense. When Google returns our search queries with a list of sites, it does so in the hope that these sites are relevant to our search and are built sufficiently well to be navigable and user friendly. No one likes visiting a site that is clunky or confusing. So, Google creates a document to outline the best practices of site development. This document is what all SEO gurus around the world have to go by. They use these guidelines to inform their SEO strategy. Essentially what we’re trying to do is say to Google, we’ve followed your guidelines and our site deserves to be noticed for the following content.

Use this post as a checklist to ensure you’re following best practices:

Title Tag

• Accurately describe each page’s content: example title tag for the homepage of a therapist ‘Home to Nirvana for your muscles – most experienced massage therapist in Hull’
• Create a different/unique title tag for each page: example for the ‘Find Me’ page: ‘Directions and map to Nirvana for your muscles clinic’
• Keep it short and sweet and don’t use the same title throughout the site

Description tag

• Accurately summarise each page’s content: example for ‘About Me’ page ‘Sports Massage Therapist with 10 years experience. Family man who specialises in cycling injuries. I live and work in Hull’ and for a ‘Contact Me’ page Don’t put off treatment any longer, give me a call today. If you have any queries at all, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m happy to help.
• Do not use the same description throughout the site

URLs

• Wherever possible, make sure that you keep the URLs in a language that people can understand. People are more likely to link to your pages if they’re named intuitively. It also helps SEO because each word serves as a keyword.
• Keywords in your URL will appear in bold in Google’s search results if someone has used that word in their search query
• Avoid URLs with lots of numbers and subdirectories e.g. (…/rec2/10292/cars/p23.php)

SItemap

• A sitemap is the blueprint of your site. Think of it as an index to your filing system or an A-Z. People use it when they can’t find what they’re looking for. Google uses it so that it knows how you’ve organised your content. Make sure you have one. Click here for a useful guide to sitemaps
• Avoid listing all the pages of your site on one level. If you have 20 menu items on the homepage, you’re not really going about it the right way. You want to group the items together so that you don’t overwhelm your users. You also have the added advantage of using keywords as the folder titles.
• Start with your homepage and then try and work out how each page relates to the others. Wherever possible you want to reduce the number of clicks involved in a user’s journey but you need to bear in mind that if you place all the links on one page you’ll overwhelm the visitor with too many options. Use your noodle, common sense is your best compass.
• Use breadcrumbs. This is an under-utilised tactic that pleases both site visitors and the Googlebot that crawls and indexes your site. Here’s an example of a breadcrumb ‘Home > Treatment > About SHEN Therapy’. No doubt you’ve seen sites employing this type of navigation on their pages. A breadcrumb shows the user how they have navigated their way through the site’s architecture (filing system). It also allows them to jump back one, two or three steps with just one click.

Images

• Avoid image links. Because Google is always looking for keywords, you’re giving up on an opportunity to use the hottest keywords if you use images as navigation links. Google considers the keywords you use in your navigation menu as some of the most important keywords on your site. Don’t throw away the opportunity to inform Google of you content by using unnecessary images.
• Store all images in your site within one folder. Usually this folder will be called ‘images’
• Use the alt attribute to describe the image. This optimises the image in Google’s eyes and provides a description of the image to visitors whose browsers have not rendered the image properly

Content

• Keep it fresh, unique and constantly updated
• Include relevant keywords wherever you possibly can
• Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to establish which keywords you want to include
• And use Google’s Webmaster Tools to find out what keywords people typed before they visited your site

Heading Tags

• There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>, the least important
• Use heading tags as a formatting tool to emphasise important content but also to emphasise the importance of certain keywords
• Google looks for heading tags. These tags are considered very important when Google decides what your site is all about and whether it likes your site. Use your hottest keywords within your h1 and h2 tags

So, you can follow the advice above or alternatively just create your own Cocoon profile on Cocoon Health. All the profiles follow best SEO practices and you won’t have to lift a finder to appear in Google’s search rankings!

This post was brought to you by the team behind Cocoon Health – the UK’s social network for health professionals and their patients.

BeMindful.co.uk

As soon as your browser completes loading the page, you’re eyes are spoilt by a richness of colour that most web developers would be frightened of using. The pink and orange work surprisingly well together and one’s eyes are instantly drawn to the links at the right had side of the page. The most important of these links is of course “What is it?”

What is mindfulness?

In the site’s own words:

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention to the present moment, using techniques like meditation, breathing and yoga. It helps us become more aware of our thoughts and feelings so that instead of being overwhelmed by them, we’re better able to manage them.

The key health benefits to this are a reduction in experiences of stress, anxiety and depression. Research also suggests that it can have a positive impact on ‘physical problems like hypertension, heart disease and chronic pain.’

The site is a one-stop-shop for anyone looking to find out about the basics, evidence and experience of two types of mindfulness based practices: MBSR (Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction) and MBCT (Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy). It also provides a search facility to find a course provider near you.

From my own experience practising mindfulness meditation is well worth looking into, especially if you’d like to find ways to reduce stress. BeMindful.co.uk is run by the Mental Health Foundation. It’s mission is to:

help people survive, recover from and prevent mental health problems. We do this by:

• learning what makes and keeps people mentally well
• communicating our findings to a wide range of people
• turning our research into practical solutions that make a difference to people’s lives

YesToLife.org.uk

This organisation is especially relevant to a great many of Cocoon Health’s members who practice complementary and alternative medicine.

What is it?

In the site’s own words:

YES TO LIFE is a new charitable initiative to open up a positive future for people with cancer in the UK by supporting an integrative approach to cancer care. An integrative approach is one which seeks to combine orthodox medicine with complementary & alternative medicine (CAM), to extend care, widen choice and improve results.

YTL is a charity that provides support to cancer sufferers by helping them to obtain complementary and alternative cancer treatments and consultations. They vet the therapists themselves and have created a directory online which anyone can search.

If you work in healthcare and would like a dose of inspiration I highly recommend you read the inspiring, if tragic, story of Bryony who was the pioneer of TLS and its services.

We’ll try to keep you abreast of other exciting health projects going on in the UK. If you want to tell us about any others, please do leave a comment and we’ll try to get round to reviewing them. Thanks

It’s our goal at Cocoon Health to build the perfect referral network for all types of health care professionals. We want to see thousands of GPs recommending the very best complementary and alternative therapists to their patients. GPs will be able to perform searches to see what therapies are within easy reach for their patients and which of their patient sare currently being treated by an alternative therapist. Cocoon Health is a no-brainer for all involved. There have been so many studies over the last few years into the practice of complementary and alternative therapies in GP practices. Each year, a new study appears showing an incremental increase in both the number of GPs referring their patients to complementary therapists and the number of GPs incorporating such therapies into their practice. This provides an opportunity for the UK’s therapists. So the question to be asked is, have you approached your local GP to make your services known? GPs may either not be informed of therapists near by or may be uncertain about their qualifications. It’s up to you to approach your local surgery and clearly state the health benefits of the therapies in which you specialise. Make sure that you refer to clinical research wherever possible. GPs are essentially scientists and will respond best to empirical evidence. Once you have built a relationship with them, invite your local GP onto the network. Once he has created his Cocoon he can recommend you to his patients. Suddenly you have the endorsement of your local GP and a new source of clients. For more information on this subject make sure you check out: http://cocoonblog.co.uk/2010/10/13/how-to-promote-your-clinic-to-a-gp-surgery/