The nation’s top social media marketing experts agree: businesses should use LinkedIn more in their marketing efforts. We took that advice to heart and decided to discover LinkedIn’s potential for ourselves, so that we could pass the results on to our clients and community.

This week on the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast, we break down the results of our internal employee engagement LinkedIn contest and discuss how similar endeavors can help you leverage LinkedIn’s untapped potential to boost both employee and patient engagement.

Tune in to discover: 

• What we did and why you shouldn’t be afraid to try it
• How we used a contest to drive employee and audience engagement 
• Why ‘selfie’-style videos performed the best across the board 
• How the contest provided a spike in our profile and business page views
• Tips for creating your own LinkedIn contest and videos

Transcript Notes

Speaker 1: Dr. Marketing Tips, paging Dr. Marketing Tips. Dr. Marketing Tips, you’re needed in the marketing department.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips Podcast, your prescription to the answers you seek to grow your medical practice easier, better, and faster. This show is all about connecting practice administrators and medical marketing professionals with peers working in practices, learning from experiences, making mistakes and sharing successes. Let’s get started.

Jennifer: Hey there, welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips Podcast. I am Jennifer.

Corey: I’m Corey.

Danielle: And I’m Danielle.

Jennifer: And today, we are here to do a recap of a project contest that we did over on LinkedIn. A couple of months ago, I was at this conference up in New York City with all of the digital marketer folks, and the topic that just kept coming up time and time again was the use of LinkedIn and how marketers and businesses are not using LinkedIn enough in their marketing. And really, the reason they were giving for people to do LinkedIn and to use LinkedIn was because LinkedIn is Facebook circa 2012 or so, when it was still the Wild, Wild West.

Jennifer: And so, while I was up there in New York, you guys probably saw that I started doing live LinkedIn videos and I know you were like, “Are you kidding me? What is Jennifer doing?” But then we came back here, and we decided to run a contest internally as a kind of an employee engagement effort, and use the data that we’re able to get from that case study with this contest to see if it makes sense for our clients to start leaning into LinkedIn too.

Jennifer: With that, first, why don’t we talk about the contest rules so that our listeners understand what it is we did, and what prizes were at stake, and then we’ll announce who the winner was. So Corey, why don’t you walk us through the contest rules?

Corey: Sure. So what we decided to do was for 30 days, whoever wanted to participate in the contest, it was kind of open to everybody, obviously encouraged, but you didn’t have to do it. But it was one video per day, and you could choose from a handful of categories. And those were: Tactics, Strategic, Patient Experience, Employee Engagement, Leadership, or a case study. We wanted the videos to be about a minute in length. It could be a little bit over, be a little bit shorter. And then it was up to each participant to track their own results on a separate spreadsheet and include their initials, the date, and what category of video they were using.

Jennifer: Yeah. It was going to be Corey, Danielle, myself, but I wasn’t going to count because I have a high follower count, and we didn’t want my influence on there to sway it; not that I think it did. Josh was going to participate, who is really behind the camera all the time. So he never gets out in front, so this was outside of this comfort zone. Taggart was going to do it, sue was going to do it. I think Lawrence, we invited into this. And I will tell you, the two people who I thought would do really well dropped out within the first two or three days. And the people who I didn’t think would stick it out, stuck it out. And then, the winner.

Corey: Congrats, Danielle.

Jennifer: Danielle was the winner. Yeah, Danielle was the winner. So Danielle, why don’t you walk us through kind of the results and what do you think was your winning video that was the one.

Danielle: I know you mentioned sticking it out, and that was kind of the hardest part. Especially because it was a month long and it was October, which is one of the longest months, too. And every day you’re like, “Oh crap, I got to do my video…What the heck am I going to talk about today?” So I think that was kind of the challenge of it. And my video that performed the best was mostly attributed to the fact that a Thought Leader commented on one of my posts, and she actually has more than 30,000 followers on LinkedIn. So, of course, when she commented on my post, her followership kind of got the notification that this person commented on this other person’s posts. So then it accelerated the views that it got on it. And it was so much more views than any of my other posts, it wasn’t even close, just because a Thought Leader on LinkedIn commented on it.

Jennifer: Do you remember what the topic was?

Danielle: I was talking about working with our clients outside of just day-to-day. It was that we have our clients’ birthdays on our calendars, we have their anniversaries on our calendars, and ways that we kind of make our clients feel special outside of the day-to-day projects, and this specific person was somebody that we had done something special for, and so that kind of encouraged her to comment on it, and then it got that extra traction from that.

Danielle: Really across the board, all of us had spikes in our profile views. Our business page also had spikes in the views because we each tagged the business page on all of our posts. As the month went on, it did trickle down. So there was a huge spike, like 200%-500% increases. And then as the month went on, it slowly decreased about 75% throughout the month. Across the board, we all did some variations of what type of videos we did. So I think the majority were selfie-style videos. Some of us did some Loom-style videos for who could do Screen Share. Others were tripod style, but those were probably the fewest of the types that we did.

Corey: Yeah, I would say from what I saw sort of anecdotally just from everyone that submitted the videos is the selfie-style video tended to do the best, and it was okay that it wasn’t professionally produced and it was a little shaky as you were sort of holding the camera up, and just sort of making your point. I tried an experiment in the second week where I actually made like different facial expressions to start the videos to see if that mattered.

Corey: So some times, I would squint or some times I would smile differently or I just have not a stern face, but just neutral.

Danielle: Like whatever your thumbnail was going to be.

Corey: Right, exactly. So I thought that that may have some sort of influence. And I did notice that when I had a big happy smile on, I got a little bit more views. So I thought that was pretty interesting.

Jennifer: So I started off with selfie-style, and then when I was showing gratitude, I got the most likes, comments and shares. And just like you guys, I saw a big push at the beginning where I had a lot of engagement, and then I tried some different styles of videos. So I did gratitude. I think we had our 13 year anniversary during the timeframe, so I wanted to show gratitude for that and we had forgotten to celebrate it.

Jennifer: We had our 200th episode of the podcast during that time and we forgot to celebrate it, so I went back and talked about it to promote the podcast. But then I tried some different styles of videos. I did some Loom videos, I got some good ones. I found when I was in my home office, in a more comfortable setting, and it was a blue wall that’s behind me in my home office, and I was sitting there and the lighting was a little different, I got a lot more engagement on those. And then when I came into the office one day, and used the studio and actually did a presentation where I had the television to my side and I was walking through a project that we often are working on, I didn’t get any engagement at all for that. And it’s odd because the stuff that was more like formalized training, actually delivering a good piece of content that I thought we would’ve done well, I didn’t do well at all.

Corey: Hey guys, Corey here, co-host of the Dr. Marketing Tips Podcast, and I wanted to interrupt this episode just for a minute to tell you about Insight Training Solutions. So, Insight Training Solutions is an ongoing employee engagement and training platform for your medical practice, meaning employees can log on and take these medical practice specific trainings whenever and wherever they are. And each training is meant to increase employee engagement, improve practice reputation, and develop some patient service mindsets.

Corey: If we’re being honest, something that we all know some employees may lack. Not calling anybody out by name. But, one of the cool things about Inside Training Solutions is they’re always developing new content, and they just released “Ten Steps to a Phenomenal Patient Experience”, where you’ll learn how to create a phenomenal patient experience, strengthen job security, and discover customer service secrets for your entire team. So this course is, in addition to the other ones they already have, which include communication across generations and how to understand today’s multi-generational workforce, and how to develop overall patient experience. This is another course, “The New Approach to Customer Service”. We’ve also got “Eight Ways to Wow Patients” and you can sign up for a free trial to see what everything is about at insighttrainingsolutions.io. That’s insighttrainingsolutions.io, or just Google “insight training solutions”. You’ll be glad you did.

Corey: Yeah. And that one took the most amount of leg work on your part to put together because you had to get the TV ready, prep the presentation and everything. The posts that did the best for me was that I was just sharing a story about a conversation that I overheard. There was a front desk person, I wrote it up and I said, “So imagine you’re a 78-year-old patient and some 20-something front desk person tells you to Google directions rather than clearly explain how to get to another office location of the same practice.” And so my video there, I just talked about how I overheard that, and how that related to a piece of training that we were doing. And that one did the best for me, I think in part because it was reacted to so many times, and I think it hit a level where there was people outside of like my initial circle that were reacting to it. And then once that happened, it seemed to really give it the boost, and that was five or seven days into it. So it was pretty early, again.

Danielle: We still had that momentum from starting. I know one of Josh’s that did really well. There was some conversation and back and forth in the comment section of his, and that was his that performed the best. I think it was about one of the tools that we use for spell-check and grammar, and so there were some back and forth and fun little comments on there, so that got more engagement.

Jennifer: One thing that I noticed too is Corey and I were actually at a client meeting together, and the client talked about seeing us on LinkedIn. And then I was at another meeting that you weren’t at, and it was a vendor who said, “Yeah, I know Corey. I just saw him on LinkedIn yesterday.” So there was a lot of conversation going on offline that people were taking notice of it.

Corey: Yeah, I heard the same thing. I actually heard from people that I know professionally that aren’t clients or anything like that. They said that, “Oh I’ve seen you’re doing a lot of the videos. I really liked those.” And with mine, I also did a little branding experiment where I was calling it ‘The Marketing Minute’ because I was trying to keep everything under a minute.

Jennifer: I thought that was great.

Corey: And people, they remembered that. So they said, “I love those little Marketing Minute things you’re doing.” And I heard that a few times throughout.

Jennifer: Did it cost anybody any money to do the videos?

Corey: No, not at all.

Jennifer: Super simple, done on your regular iPhone?

Corey: Did them on my iPhone. Held out the phone, and I did them in different locations. So I think most of yours, right? They were at home or in the office?

Danielle: In the office or on my couch.

Corey: I did most of them actually in the studio at the office. But I did some in my neighborhood. So if it was really nice out, I would just step outside and do that. And then, I was actually in California for a few days visiting a client, and I did some from the hotel room and Josh did as well. We were out there to film together, and those actually did pretty well, and those were near the end of the month. So I saw a little spike again.

Danielle: Yeah, because it looked different.

Corey: Right, exactly. It’s change of locale.

Jennifer: So for the listeners out there, if you’re thinking about doing a contest, just so we can lay out what we spent, to make it financially feasible for everybody to get excited, which is why I find it exciting. Everybody’s always wanting more money, but then there’s a handful of people that just didn’t do it, which blows me away. So what we did is we said, “For every week that you complete it, you get a hundred bucks. And the winner of the contest will get an additional $500 grand prize.” So Danielle will get, what is it, $900? $900 bonus coming your way. Yeah, if we can get this case study out, $900 coming your way. Corey, you didn’t win, but you get 400 bucks coming your way. So I think all in, I’m into it for about $2,500 for the people that actually participated, and just $2,500 for a case study, that’s not too bad. But if you consider that we’re going to take some of these videos and repurpose them so that we can use them for Evergreen content, that’s where the winner’s going to be.

Corey: Do we know, offhand, how many posts we wound up getting collectively from everybody? Because it would have been all of mine, all of yours, Lauren’s, Josh, a couple other people [crosstalk 00:12:59].

Jennifer: I would say we’re close to a hundred. Yeah, we’re close to a hundred posts, yeah. And every one of them was a video. Granted, we’re not going to use them all, but some of them, we are. And I think it gave us an opportunity to see if LinkedIn’s going to work, how difficult it was. I’ll tell you though, I feel like I got more engagement on LinkedIn than I ever do with social media, what’s on Facebook.

Corey: 122 videos at the end of it. Yeah. And I would say not only was the engagement there, but it was also a different kind of engagement, I thought. So rather than just an occasional “thumbs-up”, “like”, or what have you on Facebook or Instagram, I noticed that when people did comment, they weren’t just saying, “Hey, cool video.” They were saying, “Oh, that’s a really interesting tip. How would you apply it to this?” Or, “What do you think about using that tool in this way?” And then, we were able to have that dialogue.

Danielle: Yeah, since they actually watched it too.

Corey: Right. And I don’t know if you’d really get that, or at least I don’t get that from other social platforms. And I feel like we all got that. Every one of us has a video or two where people said, “Oh, that’s really interesting. What do you think about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Jennifer: Yeah, I thought all in, it was a good spend of our time and our energy, and it’ll give us a lot for moving forward. So Corey, do you have any recommendations or next steps for listeners that might be interested in doing this?

Corey: Yeah, so I think if you’re interested in doing this, the thing to remember is that the whole point is to engage your audience and your social circle. Whether that’s on LinkedIn or if you want to try this on another platform, whatever you’re doing, make sure that it’s relevant to them. And don’t worry about the production value. Because of what we were just saying, we did a lot of either screen recordings, or selfie style videos. Some were in the dark. So it really was the story you were telling, and not so much how you were telling it. So it doesn’t need lights and cameras and all kinds of craziness. You can just hold up a phone and get out there.

Jennifer: Yeah, all in, I thought it was a good thing to do and I look forward to trying another social platform next time.

Corey: Let’s do it.

Jennifer: All right, so with that, I’m Jennifer.

Corey: I’m Corey.

Danielle: And I’m Danielle.

Jennifer: We’ll see you next time on the Dr. Marketing Tips Podcast. Thanks for joining.

Corey: Bye, guys.

Danielle: Later.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the drmarketingtips.com podcast. If there’s anything from today’s show you want to learn more about, check out drmarketingtips.com for our podcast resource center with all the notes, links, and goodies we mentioned during the show. If you’re not already a subscriber to our show, please consider pressing the subscribe button on your podcast player so you never miss one of our future episodes. And if you haven’t given us a rating or review yet on iTunes, please find a spare minute and help us reach and educate even more of our medical practice peers. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time. Doctor’s orders.

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