7 Steps to Building an Amazing Patient Nurturing Email Workflow
The ability to use the power of marketing and strategy to advertise, increase sales or improve outreach as a business strategy has application in every industry. Just as a marketing strategy is important for any entrepreneur, Â it is equally important for healthcare providers such as doctors, dentists or orthodontists. The power of building a solid patient nurturing email workflow serves to increase engagement, improve care, save staff time, and increase your client base. With just a few simple steps, you can take advantage of powerful tools to be more efficient with your email marketing, getting the right messages to the right people at the right time.
1. Set goals
Determine your objectives for your email campaign. Is it to inform patients about new services? To provide appointment reminders to improve attendance? Is it to inform and improve compliance with treatment recommendations? Is it to improve outreach and bring in new patients? As you identify multiple objectives dependent on the patient type, then you can move to the next step where you will narrow your focus for each group.
2. Target your audience
For each goal, there is an intended target audience. Creating a list of criteria for inclusion into the group helps determine placement. Some patients will belong to the group who receive personalized appointment reminders, while another group receives a newsletter about ongoing care and specials on cosmetic procedures. Sometimes these lists will overlap and other times they will be separate. This is all part of getting the right information to the right people. Laying the groundwork is an important piece predicting the future success of your workflow.
3. Map your content
Determine what content you will deliver, what you intend to accomplish with this piece and when you will deliver it. Thinking about the examples above, the patient who gets appointment reminders might need them when they set the appointment, a week ahead of time and again the day before the appointment. For the patient receiving your newsletter offering a special on cosmetic procedures, perhaps you want to send the first notice three months before the winter holidays and then again monthly as a reminder before party season begins.
4. Compose emailsÂ
Be intentional with the message you send and consider that when you compose the email. For each type of patient, you will focus the content of the message and end with a specific call to action. Perhaps that call to action is for the patient to confirm, cancel or reschedule an appointment. Or, it is a link to learn more about a procedure and an invitation schedule a consultation. Decide here what the message will say, how many times to distribute it and what is the desired outcome.
5. Set workflow rules
You don't want to inundate patients with emails, so carefully setting up rules will prevent this. Workflow rules can specify who receives an email batch and when they receive it, but can also exclude patient groups or certain days or times. If your office is closed on Friday afternoons, you don't want to send an email with a call to action that prompts a patient to schedule via phone and no one is there to respond. Likewise, the patient who has weekly orthodontist visits might lose an important appointment reminder if they are also receiving the email about a cosmetic procedure that they do not qualify for at this time.
6. Go live
After the pre-work is completed, turn the workflow and start collecting data!
7. Analyze and improve
Analyze the data and make changes where needed. Are you meeting the goals? What is your click-through rate? What is your conversion rate? Are you seeing an improvement in adherence? Watch how the workflow performs and prepare to make changes. Change the subject line, the offer, the frequency or the call to action and analyze the impact.
At HARNESS, building email workflows is just one of the services we offer to improve your marketing campaigns, expand your business and increase your exposure. Contact us to learn more about creating a patient-nurturing workflow that will help your practice.
Gym Marketing Advice: Differentiation In Fitness Business
In a crowded field competing for Americans' disposable income, how can your gym marketing or fitness center stand out from the crowd? With nearly 100,000 gyms and fitness centers of all stripes in the United States, what will draw potential members to your gym and more importantly, keep them there?
With the high turnover rate in gym memberships, differentiating yourself from your competitors is vital to attracting new members. This holiday season, with resolution time just around the corner, is the perfect time to learn how properly made and promoted videos are a key to attracting dedicated members to your gym.
What Makes Your Gym Special?
The first step in determining how you are going to make your gym stand out from the morass is to understand why your gym should stand out. What features about your gym will make is special to potential members? Is it the equipment? The hours? The people? The location?
Actually, according to a 2014 survey, the top reason people gave for joining and sticking with their gym was the convenient location (50 percent). Ranking second at 38 percent was the equipment.
Of course, the reasons people go to and stick with a gym are as varied as the number of members of the gym. The CreditDonkey survey also found 44 percent of respondents said they go to the gym with another person, so having a workout buddy is key to sustaining membership. The survey even found that 30 percent of respondents don't even break a sweat at the gym because they are too busy chatting with their friends to get started with their workout.
All of this is just food for thought as you think about how to market your gym as a different alternative. Do you need to highlight your location? Your friendly staff? Your discount family or buddy plans? Your superior equipment? All of these can be great marketing tools if your potential customers can find out about them.
Who Are You Targeting?
That brings us to the second question you need to address. Who are you targeting as your potential customers? Do you feel like your membership is too young? Too old? Not diverse enough? Are you a women-only facility? A rock-climbing facility? A yoga studio?
If you think building a gym membership means attracting the 24-35 crowd, you might be surprised to learn the average gym member is in their early 40s. Older members tend to be more stable as they are settled into their community, have greater disposable income and stick to a fitness commitment more than their younger counterparts.
Once you've considered your selling points and your target audience, you're ready to get to work in producing what will most likely become a series of marketing videos.
More Than Just a Video on YouTube
The rise in the quality of cell phone cameras has turned everyone into a photographer and videographer. If you have the budget, a professional can contribute great ideas to enhance your marketing, but if you need to save the money, you can produce good content with the help of your staff and members.
Once you've produced the videos you believe will sell your facility to your potential customers, you still face the challenge of getting them seen. Just loading them to your website or YouTube makes no guarantee your target audience will find them.
Getting your video to stand out on the Internet is an even greater challenge than getting your gym to stand out in your community. Search Engine Watch points out that video has exploded on the Internet in recent years, so creating a video that will catch attention on Internet search engines is a constant challenge. And while Search Engine Watch offers you tips to make your video more appealing, keeping up with the ever-changing search engine optimization standards is more than you as a gym owner have time to keep up with.
Taking care of that headache is our responsibility. We have experts in video production, website development and search engine optimization that will ensure your customers will find your videos and more importantly, your gym or fitness center. Contact us to learn how we can make your marketing efforts stand out from a competitive field.
Are you ready to find out how to get your marketing in shape? Check out our Gym Marketing Guidebook.
Video Marketing for Dentists and Orthodontists - the Why and How
Most, if not all, dentists and orthodontists have a social media presence, some are better at than others. What is a big differentiator? Video marketing for dentists and orthodontists. When looking at some social media sites you will come across everything from 'home made' cell phone videos of patients and procedures, to a PowerPoint presentation that is simply a slide show of still (stock) photos with some music in the background.
If dental professionals want to capture potential patients attention, they need to be effective with their presentation style.
It's common for someone to ask a friend for a recommendation to a dentist or doctor and word-of-mouth is the absolute best advertising. The crucial point is when the person getting the recommendation goes to search out the dentist to find out more information. The dental professional only has one choice for a first impression when they get to their website or social media page. Using a quality video presentation is one key factor in creating a positive impression (no pun intended!).
Getting dental work is a not-so-pleasant experience for some people, so they need reassurance that they are in the hands of professional and caring people. A quality video will portray exactly what the potential patient needs to see to feel comfortable picking up the phone to call for an appointment.
Here are some important facts about video marketing:
- 70% of marketing professionals report that video converts better than any other medium
- The average internet user spends 88% more time on a website with video than without.
- 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. - Forbes
A successful video campaign is just one aspect of an overall marketing and relationship-building strategy. As a health professional, you are an absolute expert in your field, having spent hundreds of hours studying and learning your art. The one thing that is not taught in medical colleges is how to market yourself. This is where you need to seek out a professional who has spent their time studying their field of marketing. Partnering with a consulting firm that has a successful track record will benefit your practice immensely.
Here are some areas where video marketing for dentists and orthodontists can be successful:
- A promotional video that explains who you are and what you do. A smiling, confident face goes a long way in making someone comfortable. If you have a team practice, then that video should show you as a team.
- A virtual tour that shows what your facility looks like, highlighting any new technology along with anything that helps make the patient experience that much more comfortable. You can even include short clips of some simple procedures; something that sets you apart.
- Patient testimonials that communicate your practices value, expertise and professionalism. Word of mouth is the best advertising and having real people give positive testimony will go a long way to building confidence in a potential patient.
- Stand out from the competition by adding a video to your business listing in online directories
Partnering with a professional consulting firm makes it simple to accomplish these goals. Some of the other, finer points of videos in marketing include:
- Using videos to drive traffic to your website/social media. Search engines love video, and with proper video SEO, you can use video to drive lots of traffic to your website.
- Use targeted keywords when titling and tagging your videos
- Create a variety of videos, each focusing on a different search term
- Use multiple video sharing sites to increase links back to your main website
As pointed out earlier, video is just one aspect of a successful marketing program. Tying in all of the other tools available with professionally produced videos will ensure that your practice attracts new patients and continues to grow. Please go to our website and download the free e-book "Video Marketing Road Map". This will give you and idea of what we can help you accomplish in your practice. You can contact us for more information or with any questions.
Inbound Marketing to Ensure Customers Find Your SaaS Business (Part 2)
As the developer of a Software as a Service company, you obviously have put a great deal of thought into your product or products. Even before development began, you thought about what kind of service you could provide, what kinds of companies you could serve, why your product(s) is best for those potential customers.
Now, you need to figure out how you can best reach those potential customers and convince them your SaaS company is the best solution to their needs.
That's where the services of an inbound marketing company can come to your assistance. This is the second part of a two-part blog on how inbound marketing can ensure customers find you in the burgeoning SaaS business. In the first blog, we offered you a primer on inbound marketing that you can find here. In the second part, we will explain how all that hard work you did in development can lead directly to a successful inbound marketing program for your SaaS company.
Who Are Your Potential Customers?
As we explained in the primer, inbound marketing targets potential customers who turn to the Internet looking for your service, generally to solve a need or problem they are encountering in their lives or business. In the marketing field, we refer to this as their "pain point" and address how your product can ease their pain.
The first step in identifying these potential customers is to develop a "persona" so you can target the communication to the appropriate level.
Do you have an accounting software package you'd like to sell to Fortune 500 companies? Or do you have an accounting package you'd like to sell to a mom and pop retail store? Or maybe it's an accounting package you'd like to sell to farmers who spend their days in giant tractors, tilling thousands of acres. Each of these "personas" will respond to different forms and levels of communication.
What if your SaaS idea is something completely different? Maybe you've developed a program that can point avid readers to authors who write similar works and you get a share from each book you recommend through an online bookseller. Or maybe it's obscure documentary films. Or Japanese anime. Again, you are targeting very different "personas" so you need your language to appeal to each of these targets as they search for answers.
The more you know about your potential customer, the better your inbound marketing effort can succeed.
What Are Their Pain Points?
Before you ever developed your software, you had a vision for what it could do and why it could appeal to your customers. You already were thinking about how you could relieve their pain points, whether you thought of it that way or not.
Putting that thought into language that will attract potential customers is the next step to a successful inbound marketing effort. Knowing the language of your potential customers is vital to successfully meeting the ever-changing demands of Internet search engines.
If you're promoting that accounting software to Fortune 500 companies, their CFO is not going to search for "accounting software". She is more likely to search for "ASC 606 compliance" to deal with her latest pain point. Understanding how your best potential customers will speak and search boosts your chances of reaching them in the first place.
Drawing Your Customers into the Funnel
If you remember from the primer, we talked about how inbound marketing casts a wide net through search engine optimization to ensure your company appears highly in search results. The next step is to make those searches pay off into customers who enter your funnel and become paying customers.
Research now is pointing to the absolute necessity to feature video on your website and in any marketing effort. HubSpot reports that 59 percent of executives would rather watch video than read text; while individual consumers are four times as likely to watch a video as read text about a product, Small Business Trends reports.
The same report from Small Business Trends notes that 50 percent of executives are likely to seek more information about a product or service after watching a video. The same research found 65 percent will visit a marketer's site and 39 percent will call a vendor after seeing a product or service video.
As you can see, you've already done much of the hard work necessary to launch an inbound marketing effort for your SaaS company in identifying your potential customers and their pain points. Contact us to learn how to take the next step in developing a marketing program that will make your company stand out in the crowded field of cloud computing.
Inbound Marketing to Ensure Customers Find Your SaaS Business (Part 1)
You have the idea. You have the expertise to put the package together. You even are entering into one of the hottest fields of business. Now, you just need to learn how to find customers in need of your software as a service company.
Since you're targeting a tech-savvy field, you need to be where they can find you. According to Forbes magazine, public cloud-based business is expected to grow at a robust 19.4% annually with revenues to reach $141 billion by 2019. Those kinds of projections also mean opportunists will be flocking to the field, increasing competition for your business. Inbound marketing is the best way for you to ensure customers find you in the burgeoning SaaS business.
In this two-part blog series, we'd like to give you a quick primer on why inbound marketing can benefit your SaaS company and in the second part start you thinking about how you can stand out to your potential customers.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Plain and simple, inbound marketing is how you find customers among those who come searching for you. Well, maybe they are not literally looking for you, but they are looking for someone who can do what you do to help them do what they do.
Put another way, your potential customer has a need or a problem, what marketers call a pain point. When they have this pain point, what are they going to do? In today's technological market, they are going to go to the Internet searching for a solution to their pain point. You are the person with that solution, so they need to be able to find you, then believe that you are the best person to solve their pain.
Inbound marketing works by positioning you to be found by the most potential customers who have a similar pain point and need your solution.
How Does Inbound Marketing Succeed for Software Businesses?
Inbound marketing works by looking at your potential customer base with a funnel approach. A funnel is wide at the top and narrows down as it gets closer to delivering the goods where they belong. A funnel approach to marketing is one that casts a wide net at the top where potential customers can learn about you and your service. Once the customers become interested, the marketing becomes more targeted to convince them to advance further into the funnel to learn how your service solves their pain point, ultimately turning that potential customer into a money-paying customer.
Inbound marketers first cast that wide net by ensuring your company is positioned to be found by anyone who has a certain pain point that your company can solve. Inbound marketers do this by understanding your potential customers, knowing their pain points and ensuring when they search for a solution, your business stand out among the search results. This is called search engine optimization.
Because Internet search engines always are trying to give their customers the best results, they constantly change how they judge content to ensure the best results. As a busy executive, you don't have time to keep up with those changes, but an inbound marketing company can do that. Marketers must understand such language as keywords, long string keywords, video matrix, etc. to ensure your content stays at the top of the search engines' results.
Casting the net is just the first part of the inbound marketing approach. The next steps involve capturing those potential customers' attention and convincing them your company offers the best solution to their pain point(s). In the next blog post, we'll talk about how you can help with an inbound marketing campaign by thinking about who your potential customers are and how you can offer them the best solution to their pain point.
Contact us if you'd like to learn more about the intricacies of inbound marketing and how it is the best solution for SaaS companies seeking to expand their customer base.
Should You Post Video on Social Media?
As we have mentioned in the past, by 2020 around 80% of Internet traffic will consist of video views. So, when this question arises, it is a little surprising. Wistia broke this query down very nicely with a graphic:
WISTIA
Wistia, in their usual awesome way, goes on to explain that even small businesses with a single (or no) marketing team should be thinking about social video. They discuss which channels work best for a given situation. We usually recommend to our clients that they use an omnichannel approach to video marketing. Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Linkedin, Snapchat (sometimes, depending on the brand), and Wistia for hosting videos on the client's site.
Why Wistia? The answer is relatively straightforward: Wistia is a subscription platform that doesn't rely on ad revenue as its business model. So what does that matter? Well consider that Youtube is interested in serving you ads and keeping you on Youtube. That is how they make money. That's why they continue to suggest additional videos to you, so you keep watching cat videos for as long as possible. The longer you stay, the more ads they can serve.
YOUTUBE
However, Youtube has its place in your video marketing mix. Consider Youtube as a top-of-the-funnel channel. You can utilize it for educating your market and reaching new viewers. By answering questions that your future customers are asking through educational and entertaining video, you are likely to gain trust while building authority in their perception of your brand. You then have an opportunity to drive that viewer to your site and continue the relationship through lead generation tools.
Facebook is similar in being ad supported. Facebook has become the ever-present social network in most of our lives. Video views make up more than half of Facebook use, so it is a no-brainer to publish your videos there. Similar to Youtube, you may consider Facebook a top-of-the-funnel channel. However, Facebook is unique in that once you gain a follower, you can continue to nurture that relationship through social interaction. So the social network can work throughout the sales funnel, but you should always focus on driving traffic to your site. Your goal is to own the interactions and move prospects through your funnel with videos that target viewers at each stage of their buyer's journey.
If you have questions about how to use video at each stage of your sales process, please drop us a line. We are happy to help!
Active vs Passive Voice Quiz
Like many writers using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, Active and Passive Voice was a new concept to me, and I didn't quite understand it at first.  Yoast was always giving me warnings that my posts had too much passive voice.  My short form articles with lots of bullet points and lists seemed to naturally trend towards the active voice. But what became especially annoying is that the better and longer I felt my writing was, the more passive my posts would become! That's why I started practicing using the Active vs Passive Voice Quiz, and finally made a break through in my understanding.
So what is the passive voice exactly?
In Passive Voice, the subject of the sentence is acted upon by the verb. Conversely, a sentence written in Active Voice has the subject perform the action stated by the verb directly.
| Â Active | Passive |
|---|---|
|  The builders remodeled the house to help it sell. |  The house was remodeled by the builders to help it sell. |
| The captain will give you orders. | Orders will be given to you by the captain. |
| The biology class viewed the frog. | The frog was viewed by the biology class. |
| Martin posted the funny cat video on Facebook. | The funny cat video was posted on Facebook by Martin. |
| No one responded to my new sales ad. | My new sales ad was not responded to by anyone. |
Why does good copywriting avoid passive voice?
Articles that are well written and easy to read avoid using passive voice. Â The problem with passive sentences is that it can be hard to determine who or what is acting. The result is very removed writing that also pulls the reader out of the story even if they understand what is going on. Â You should avoid passive voice or anything that makes your articles hard to read whenever you possibly can.
Are there times when it makes sense to use passive voice?
There are going to be some times when using passive voice is unavoidable.  If you are writing a scientific manuscript or guide, it will be very hard to avoid using the passive voice.  There are also instances where you could easily avoid using the passive voice, but you go with passive because it sounds more like natural speech.
And using passive voice is also a technique that is commonly used to subtly avoid responsibility.  A child might say, "The dishes got dropped," when a more accurate active sentence would be, "I dropped the dishes."
How To Get Better At Writing in an Active Voice
Looking at lists of examples can be an effective way to start intuiting the pattern of active and passive voice. Â It can also help to write using software like Grammarly to make your writing better. Â But it didn't REALLY start clicking for me until IÂ started practicing with quizzes based on those example lists.
Below is a quick quiz you can use to see if you have a good understanding of this concept or determine if you need a little practice like I did.
Active vs Passive Voice Quiz
The Best Gym Ads
The Best Gym Ads
In our work creating gym marketing campaigns for our clients, we have been crawling the web looking for the absolute best ads ever produced for fitness centers. We are really proud of the list we have come up with, and were honestly shocked at some of the not-so-successful (read: bad) gym ads we encountered. These ads represent the best of the best in terms of visual design, emotional appeal, market positioning and humor.
Company: Â Ascent Protein
Agency: TDA Boulder
We love this ad because it doesn’t hit you over the head with its message. Â It’s a very clever way to connect with the pride gym goers have in waking up early.
Company: Â Gold’s Gym
Agency: Taejun Park: School of Visual Arts
This ad is not only incredibly visually clever, but it is more impressive because it was made by students!  The creativity they displayed has to be contrasted with some of the cringe worthy Gold Gym ads in the worst ads section.  Maybe Gold’s should stick to hiring students.
Company: Â Yo BK Yoga Studio
Agency:Â J. Walter Thompson New York
The idea of fat melting away to reveal a new person underneath is not a new one. Â But combined with an excellent illustrator and a great Yoga pose it certainly feels like one.
Company: Â Equinox
Agency:Â Wieden + Kennedy New York
I have to admit that I don’t understand every ad in this “Commitment” series.  But they are all undoubtably visually striking and very hard to forget.  Some of the ads are a little risqué so check them out at your own discretion.
Company: Â Olympia Gym
Agency:Â Rediffusion Dyr
If this ad is depressing you, wait until you see the rest of this series.  While these ads might not be “fun”, they are certainly some of the most emotionally powerful advertisements that we came across.
Company: Â Power House Health Club
Agency:Â Euro Rscg Delhi
While I’m not sure these Gym ads don’t have some question marks regarding intellectual property, its undeniable that they provoke an instant reaction. Â Its not all about surprise with these ads however, as they are funny and tell a story that might resonate with many people about reality vs expectations. Â For a certain psychological profile I feel these ads could be highly motivating and funny. Â The rest of the ads in the series are just as good. (Fat Superman) (Fat Spiderman)
Company:  Power House Gym
Agency: Savannah College of Art & Design
The genius behind this ad is the carefully placed interaction with the outside environment. Â This is extremely difficult to do, and when this technique is attempted it almost never comes out this well.
Company: Â Pole Dance Studio
Agency:Â Unknown
This ad is hilarious, but appropriate in so many ways. Â Making an ad that works on a pole cannot have been an easy challenge, and it is awesome that they were able to communicate effectively and then ad the joke.
Can Google Stop Pop Up Ads?
Is there still a need to stop pop up ads?
Popups have been annoying users since the dawn of the internet, maybe even before that. Â Many of us thought that the publisher's process to stop pop up ads would be natural. Â We thought that when designing for user experience became a priority for the web, that it meant the death of the pop up. Â As many readers of Forbes will be familiar with the example below, the death of the pop up was greatly exaggerated.
Just as the first wave of viagra promoting insanity boxes finally began to vanish from the internet, they were replaced by the second generation of popups.  These popups were more aesthetically pleasing, and they let go of the contrasting colors and often blinking text. The new pop ups focused on being a normal advertisement but they blocked you from the content you were looking for.
This article isn’t just about how horrible pop ups are or how to stop pop up ads. It is about why pop ups were created in the first place.  How have pop ups have evolved with the web?  And what will come next to fill the void when popups leave?
Pop up ads are not evil.  They are simply a bad solution to a problem that every website owner has. This article is about what happens after we stop pop up ads.
Why businesses need to use pop up ads.
Popup ads have been used by websites to help grow their email list, promote their services, or in any way imaginable to monetize the content that brought you to their site.  The worst popups actually will get in the way of a user who is trying to buy a product on the site, by distracting them and trying to get them to look at a different product. This is something you still see commonly on Shopify websites that are run by small businesses who don’t have experience in customer experience design.
It’s not easy to get a user who has come to read an article to give you their email address for repeated interaction. Forcing them to give you their email address to view the content is actually a viable strategy to achieve that result in the short term.
The problem is that it's similar to forcing someone to give you their wallet by pointing a gun. The user has two choices, they can give in to your demand or they can run away. The gated content exchange also doesn’t look at the relationship from a long-term perspective. Just because you have someone’s email, does that mean they really want you to email them? What do you think the difference is in rates of fake email address and spam reports from emails gathered through forced popups vs freely given email addresses?
The response to the pop up
Popup blockers like AD Blocker have grown like crazy in an effort to stop pop up ads.
- Ad blocking estimated to cost publishers nearly $22 billion during 2015.
- There are now 198 million active adblock users around the world.
- Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months.
- US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.
- UK ad blocking grew by 82% to reach 12 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.
This is a disaster for publishers. These blockers are installed to block intrusive and unwelcome advertisement, but they also block out all the good faith efforts that marketers are making to present a well designed and relevant ad experience to the users.
Newspaper publishers are trying to figure out how to make their businesses viable online. These blocked ads can make the difference between continuing to exist or failing completely.  In the end the website visitor wants the content of those websites and they do not want them to go out of business.  The email exchange just needs to reflect the relationship both parties want to have.
Proposed Solution - Google punishing websites
Google is now going to be ranking websites based on how those websites use of obstructive popups. Google calls pop ups "interstitials". They will actually not penalize websites for using them for very specific reasons, like age verification for alcohol brands.  This is great because it may make browsing the web better for the end user, and it may also reduce the number of users installing ad blocking software. (This is probably the long term reason Google is doing this)
There will still be really great ways to remind the user to give you an email address if they enjoy your content. Products like HelloSign lead to users who sign up and are excited to hear from you! The main difference is that the website owner must actually take the time to think about their customers. What emails they will be sending to their list? Why would a customer want to receive these emails?
Websites will then sell the idea of joining an email list for a certain benefit. Â Which is much better than exchanging an email address just to view the content of the page you are already on.
Confession: this article was written by a former pop up ad creator and abuser.
Google Amp - What it means for your website
What is Google AMP?
Google Amp is a new project designed to speed up the internet for Mobile users.  AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, probably because the acronym for Mobile Acceleration Project (Google MAP) was already taken.
How does AMP work?
AMP displays versions of your page to Google without any extra formatting, and in a way that greatly reduces their time to download by stripping out all but the most essential information.
When will the Amp update Happen?
Even though AMP has been around since last October, AMP is important for your search engine rankings NOW because Google has begun to adjust your position in the rankings for Mobile viewers based on Amp.
Does AMPÂ effect me?
Amp pages are not important for every web site. Â Amp is not even important for all pages within a site. But if you are a news publisher or have an active blog it is important that those pages are AMP compatible.
Does Google AMP block ads?
According to Matt Cutts of Google AMP does not effect well behaved ads.  Which could be great for everyone, both readers and publishers if websites are rewarded for having quality ads.
What should I do now?
WordPress has already released an easy to use plugin to convert your pages to amplified ones.  Shopify and HubSpot have not commented on a AMP update to their systems, but business that want to get ahead of the AMP curve have options to do their own upgrades. Contact Harness if you have questions about upgrading your site.Â
Conclusion - What does AMP look like?
Google will be displaying AMP pages with a lighting bolt logo, so keep an eye out for it while you are browsing on your phone to see what you think of AMP pages and decide if you like the update. Do you want to see what AMP pages look like right now? To see the AMP version of this page just click our link for our Google AMP example.