As part of our 2024 Digital Healthcare Marketing Trends Survey, we asked healthcare marketers how their budgets are faring in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Four years after the pandemic’s initial hit, many organizations are beginning to bounce back financially. However, too often, the last place that recovery is felt is the marketing department — our survey found that just 30% of organizations expect their budgets to grow this year. One in five healthcare organizations continue cutting their digital marketing budgets to mitigate more significant financial issues.
If you’re on the marketing or web teams at one of these organizations, where you’re given a budget that doesn’t allow for much wiggle room or investment into new digital initiatives and staff, you’re not alone. And you’re not entirely out of options, either.
Making progress toward your marketing goals is possible without breaking the bank or hiring more employees. Here are a few ways you and your team can get the most value out of your marketing budget, no matter its size.
Prioritize user experience
To get the most bang for your buck, you need to identify the most impactful changes you can make to your marketing program that will help it resonate with consumers and, in turn, drive conversions.
One of the most effective ways of doing this is through a user experience (UX) assessment. Through this process, you (or an agency partner like Geonetric) will gather pain points, successes, and other vital patient journey information from various stakeholders to create a persona.
Using this persona, we can get an idea of their journey from prospect to patient and share observations, best practices, and competitor notes to help identify the problem areas you’d want to put your marketing resources toward first. You can also take it a step further through user testing, which utilizes real consumer feedback on things like the navigability of your website.
By leveraging the power of user insights, you can work through your budget and staffing challenges with impactful, informed solutions that will provide maximum results.
Tackle low-hanging fruit
Sometimes, the most significant marketing impact can be made from minor fixes that require little effort or resources.
Think broken links, pages that return an error message, incorrect page tags — these are small issues that may seem inconsequential but can completely derail a customer’s journey if they visit your website or search for your services online.
Take the time to audit your site for these errors, and fix them as soon as possible. You may be surprised by the results you’ll get in exchange for a relatively low effort!
Make incremental website changes
Depending on your budget and staffing situation, a full website redesign may not be on the table right now. But that doesn’t mean you have to let your website grow stagnant!
You can keep your site up-to-date and able to solve consumer’s pain points through iterative updates. Taking an iterative design approach rather than launching into a complete redesign allows you to make continuous improvements over time.
Examples include updating the information on your location landing pages to better answer patients’ questions, creating a careers microsite to attract and inform prospective employees, or launching a content hub to provide helpful information and improve your site’s search engine optimization.
By taking on smaller web updates as needed, your next redesign — whenever you’re able to take it on — can start with a strong foundation instead of a website that’s grown outdated.
Track results
No matter your budget, you’ll want to monitor how the marketing efforts or improvements you can implement are performing.
By analyzing data like website visits, conversion rates, and search rankings, you can tell what efforts are showing results and worth allocating resources toward — and which ones aren’t.
You can also loop in some user experience (UX) insights by looking at statistics like bounce rate and site search terms to identify areas of your site that might not be meeting users’ expectations.
Those areas could be candidates for the “low-hanging fruit” to tackle as soon as you can — think creating an FAQ section to answer users’ common questions, fixing broken images, etc. — to see results while you’re waiting on the resources to tackle larger-scale projects.
Ready to get more out of your marketing?
At Geonetric, we’re helping healthcare organizations at all stages of their financial comeback see results from their marketing strategy. For expert insights on marketing tactics like user experience and iterative website design, contact our team today!
We also help healthcare marketers do more with the resources they have through our VitalSite® content management system. VitalSite® is designed specifically for healthcare organizations to make managing their websites flexible and intuitive, no matter the size of their marketing department. Schedule a demo to see firsthand what VitalSite® can do for your organization!