Digital Marketing from Separate Silos

There’s a problem with how we usually think about digital marketing. It’s a widespread problem, existing regardless of organization size or industry. It’s in itself a large problem, but it can have wide-reaching effects. It’s an often-necessary problem, originating simply as a means to methodically approach the large task of marketing on the internet.

The problem is this: we often treat organic marketing and paid marketing as two separate and distinct avenues. We see, time and time again, one team responsible for SEO and another responsible for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) with neither communicating with the other. Worse, often these teams are not equipped to speak with each other, with multiple agencies accounting for PPC and social media (itself split into paid and organic) and legacy marketing and organic. Some are managed in-house, some are outsourced. Oftentimes, focus can only be made for one, and the others are ignored.

Why is this the case? A number of reasons. Bandwidth limitations and individual expertise tend to be the biggest factors. Ultimately, regardless of the reason, the effect is the same: even though there are often multiple points of overlap between organic and paid marketing, many organizations continue to keep them siloed.

What is PPC Cannibalization and Why It Matters

Why this is a problem may not be obvious. If the right hand and the left hand are competent, what difference does it make whether either knows what its counterpart does? Brass tacks, when the right hand is your SEO and your left is your PPC, the difference is this: money.

Let us assume that you bring your SEO and PPC onto the same team.

SEO Work

Consider the work often performed for SEO:

• Pinpoint service lines that are critical for success.
• Perform keyword research to see how your audiences search for those service lines, finding terms that you try to weave into on-page content with an eye for balance of readability and popular terms.
• Write in references to your organization name and service area throughout, on-page and off.
• Use these tactics and many others, all the while benchmarking and measuring the organic traffic flowing in to find success.

PPC Work

Now, you turn your attention to managing your PPC. Maybe you have a specific objective: a maternity class that you want to offer, a flu vaccine clinic that you want to schedule. Maybe you just want to advertise a service line. You do your due diligence. You do our keyword research here, as well. You write your ads. You build your audiences. You set up your tracking and define your conversions.

Bridging the Gap

Finally, consider, your SEO work is working. Organic traffic grows month over month. You perform strongly with your branded keywords and you are making headway in your priority service lines, too. Your PPC is working, too. CPCs are low. Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and Conversions exceed expectations.

However, when you look at the search terms on which you are spending the bulk of your budget, you find your organization name or brand again and again. You look at these same searches organically, and you see that these are also high-performing. The average position is high, CTR looks good, and none of your competitors are bidding against your brand in their own PPC campaigns.

You are, in effect, paying Google Ads for keywords that you have already mastered organically. The name for this, colorfully enough, is PPC Cannibalization.

Bringing Your Digital Presence into Sync

Thankfully, this problem is easy to fix. We can bring keyword lists in line with your high-performing SEO searches, reducing overlap as much as possible. The trick is finding the overlap in the first place. In order to do so, we need to be able to audit both your PPC and your SEO performance.

This can be a challenge organizationally for a number of reasons, some of which I have described in this article. However, it is critical to protect your advertising budget. Every dollar spent in advertising that you lose to PPC cannibalization is a dollar that could be used for another ad auction on a search for which you haven’t (yet) built an organic approach.

Ready to Get Started?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. By auditing your SEO terms and PPC searches side by side, you can help your SEO and PPC work together, in sync, instead of independently. If that sounds overwhelming, request help from our experts. By keeping a holistic view of your digital presence, we can help you pivot to account for changes in the search and organic landscape. So, ensure that your advertising budget works for you more efficiently and more intentionally. Reach out to us and schedule a time with one of our experts to get the ball rolling.

As if you weren’t busy enough trying to reassure your community of the COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy, safety, and potential ability to make a real dent in the pandemic, add something else to your list: answering an understandably eager, growing number of people who want to get themselves or someone they love vaccinated as soon as possible. Emotions are running high and your community is looking to your organization to learn when and how they can access this potentially life-saving care.

The Biden administration has announced the U.S. will have enough doses to inoculate every American by the end of the summer and the country is on pace to vaccinate almost one-third of the population by May 1. But limited supplies, along with federal and state requirements for priority groups during the initial roll-out, have led to confusion and anxiety.

Follow our tips to help your community feel more informed, position your organization as a leading authority, and deliver remarkable content.

Translate State & County Guidelines

Help people understand how vaccine allocation phases will work in your community. Translate jargon or complex information into plain language. Tailor this content to your target audiences’:

• Health literacy
• Search terms
• Languages spoken

Explaining Vaccine Distribution

Spell out who is eligible and when, as well as the logistics of getting vaccinated at your organization. Be transparent about limited vaccine quantities while communicating your work to secure additional doses. Link to relevant federal, state, and county websites.

If you have an existing COVID-19 hub on your website, this is a great place for this information to live.

Communicate What Steps People Can Take Now

Make your content actionable and empowering, even for readers who aren’t yet eligible for vaccination.

• What can people do right now so they’re best prepared when the time comes to get vaccinated? Check out an excellent example from the Pennsylvania Department of Health on how to get ready, including talking to your doctor about whether the vaccine is right for you and learning what to expect during and after vaccination.
• Advise readers what steps they’ll need to take to successfully access vaccination services at your organization. For example, if they don’t currently have a MyChart account, do you recommend they create one?
• Continue your messaging on the importance of mask-wearing, handwashing, and social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Protect Staff Capacity

Clear, easily found information that answers common questions and follows the recommendations in this blog post can help lower potentially overwhelming call and email volumes. If you don’t want people to contact specific offices or healthcare providers at this time, make that clear in your content. Let community members know if there’s a specific phone number or email address you want them to reach out to instead.

Publish Updates Regularly

Your audience needs ongoing reassurance, and regular updates help them stay informed while lessening anxiety. Aim for weekly social media posts. Send email updates whenever relevant news breaks or information changes.

Make an Emotional Connection

Maya Angelou said it best: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” To make your content resonate with your target audiences:

• Appeal to their sense of community. Make it a virtue to wait one’s turn and let others who have greater need go first. Put a human face on this message. Accompanied by “thank you for letting us go first,” feature your organization’s healthcare heroes or the patients who were vaccinated due to age, occupation, or other risk factors.
• Be positive. Aim for an optimistic, confident voice and tone.
• Lead with empathy. Everyone’s lives have been disrupted to some degree by the pandemic. Let your community know you understand how they feel — the people in your organization feel the same and are working hard to meet their needs.
• Err on the side of sensitivity. If you’re trying to make your message resonate with a specific group, get feedback from people in that group. Ask how your content may be interpreted, if there’s a more effective approach, if there’s any potential for offense or misinterpretation, and if the message is relevant to their needs, preferences, and concerns. Establishing these relationships if they don’t already exist not only benefits your content, but also shows that your organization cares about serving their needs.
• Weave in your brand ethos. Let your community know how your mission and values apply to your COVID-19 response, including your vaccination efforts. In real time, they’re seeing your organization works to improve everyone’s health and well-being.

Find More Tips or Ask For Feedback

Read further strategic recommendations for COVID-19 vaccination communications, or contact Geonetric today if you need any help with your efforts.

But achieving true success can be elusive. Too often healthcare organizations are paying for keywords they are already getting organically, or reporting on success metrics that just don’t move the revenue needle.

Join Geonetric pros Tim Lane, Director, Digital Marketing, and Joe Dreshar, Digital Marketing Strategist, and learn how to take a holistic approach to paid search and SEO to make sure your efforts are working in tandem. They’ll cover why healthcare is unique when it comes to paid efforts, and why the nuances around how search engines respond to searches to conditions and treatments matter to the campaigns you’re running today. You’ll also learn how to take your tracking to a new level, from custom campaign tracking to optimization tactics to tying efforts together across disparate MarTech stacks.

Investing in video makes sense — but it’s important to do it right.

Have you ever been in a public, quiet space without your headphones and needed to watch a video? Or, perhaps one of the characters in the show you’re binge watching has a strong accent, and you can’t understand what they’re saying. If you’ve ever been in one of these situations, you know how handy captions can be. Captions are not just a “nice to have” feature, they are necessary for some people.

Adding captions to your videos and allowing users to toggle them on and off provides a better user experience for everyone and helps your site be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant.

Here is guidance for adding captions, audio description (AD), and transcripts to your videos.

Captioning for Accessibility Compliance

Captions can be confusing if you do not realize there are several different types of captions.

• Basic Captions: These are written words, visible on the screen and synced with the video, often used by people who have difficulty hearing.
• Audio Description (AD): During pauses in the main sound track, AD provide information about what is happening in the scene (scene changes, characters, actions, and on screen text) for those who cannot see.

It’s important to note that prerecorded videos (with sound and visuals) need to be captioned for both of these user groups in order to be AA compliant with WCAG 2.1. Videos that are live streamed, have yet another set of guidelines you’d need to follow.

How to add captions

There are several ways to add captions to your videos and your approach depends mostly on where the videos will be hosted. Captions can be created using a time stamped text file (.srt, .sami, .xml) that is loaded into a media player and can be turned on or off. These are called closed captions. Or captions can be “burned into” the video layer during production and are always visible, these are called open captions.

Different media players support different types of caption files. There are basic and advanced closed caption files.

• Basic file formats (.srt, .sbv, .sub) only require basic timing information
• Advanced file formats, such as WebVTT, are recommended because users can configure the font, size, and color to make it easier for them read. Once those settings are saved, they are applied to any WebVTT video that user comes accross

Try not to rely only on one caption file format. Including both a basic and an advanced will ensure your captions are published and viewed by the largest audience.

Many popular video platforms allow you to upload your own captions. For example, YouTube allows you to use “Automatic Captions” or upload your own .srt file.

If you do not have a .srt file, using the automatic captions is a nice place to start, but be aware that YouTube doesn’t always translate the best, so you’ll likely need to go into the generated .srt file and correct some of the text.

How to add audio description

AD is typically added by creating an additional audio track that provides verbal descriptions of the visuals in a video. AD is rarely available, but is required to be AA compliant with WCAG 2.1.

Sometimes, in order to provide the amount of detail necessary, the video needs to be paused while the scene is being described and then started again. If this is the case, it’s usually easier to create two different videos, one with AD and one without. In order to comply with WCAG a version of the video with AD simply needs to be made available. This means that you can embed the version without AD your site, and provide a link to the version with AD.

Not all videos need AD, for example, if the video is simply of a doctor talking to the camera and there are no other visuals (charts, graphs, video clips of them walking through halls or smiling at patients, etc.) then, as long as that doctor introduces themselves at the beginning of the video, AD is not necessary.

YouDescribe is a free online tool that allows you to take a YouTube video and create an audio description soundtrack. There are also companies that will describe the video for you, such as AI Media and CaptionSync.

How to add transcripts

Although only mandatory to be AAA complaint, adding a transcript for your prerecorded media is a good idea.
A transcript is the only way that someone who is both deaf and blind can access the content in your video. The transcript needs to display as text on your website so it can be output in brail on a refreshable brail display.

Transcripts are important for not only video files, but audio files (like podcasts) too. Transcripts typically read like a screen play, including both the spoken words and descriptions of each scene.

There is another perk to adding transcripts for your audio and video files. Just like assistive technologies, web crawlers read text. Providing text versions of your media allows web crawlers to index the wonderful content you’ve spent so much time creating.

Time to get started!

If you’re looking for more information, check out the W3C guidelines on captions. YouDescribe offers a nice step-by-step tutorial on adding AD, and the Bureau of Internet Accessibility shares some tips for YouTube closed captioning. If you’d like to talk to a member of our team about how to improve the accessibility on your site, you can sign up for a free accessibility checkup.

Each year’s web design trends provide an opportunity to take a closer look at patterns developing and improve the way people experience your organization’s website. As we reflect on a year full of challenges, we take a closer look at the current and upcoming web design trends that are making a major impact in the online world of healthcare and when to apply them.

Minimalism

Minimalism has become a design trend that refuses to quit and a go-to for web designers over the last decade. Minimalist design is based around using only essential elements, such as shapes, clean text, limited colors and empty space, to create a webpage that is simple, functional, and impactful.

Colorful minimalism is also on the rise, featuring block colors and bold backgrounds, simple sans serif fonts and minimalist design elements to create a simple yet attractive website design. This approach to web design will continue to be a key component to providing an intuitive and memorable user experience.

3D visuals & photography

3D design has come a long way from the blocky and beveled edges and is being seen less as distracting flair and more as a contributor to the overall user experience and page design. 3D designs can be layered with other elements, such as soft shadows and gradients, adding a sense of uniqueness and depth to any webpage and can be used to captivate your visitors and guide them to their next click.

Photography will continue to be a trend as it helps tell a story, which is why real imagery is preferred to stock photos. We may also see more sites move away from larger hero images and into banner sizes that are more generous to the content on the page.

Mixed media is also on the rise. The collage trend of using a variety of media, such as photos, illustrations, graphics, motion and text to create an inspiring and eye-catching aesthetic will remain popular.

Hand-drawn elements & digital art

These imperfect elements inject emotion and humanity into websites, allowing organizations to connect with their users on a more personal level.

With an increased focus on diversity and representation in design in 2020, many illustrators are now featuring quirky people of all shapes and sizes, a style commonly referred to as “odd bodies”. This is a good way to get more diverse representation on your site when your photography may not match your populations.

Show off your brand personality by using unique hand-drawn icons and elements to get the attention of users. Using a more individual style for your icons can help them stand out in your site hierarchy. Using a more individual style for your icons can help them stand out in your site hierarchy.

Color & gradients

Instead of subtle monotone gradients, we are now seeing multiple colors combined with noticeable contrast. If used appropriately, the contrast creates an illusion of depth and provides a sleek, cutting-edge appearance to your website.

We are also seeing gradients used through fine shading to give a rounded feel to flat icons.

Use gradients cautiously as a background to content to ensure text legibility and color contrast are met across all screen sizes, while zooming the page, and using different text sizes.

In addition, web designers are working to be more conscious of user experience, creating sites that help avoid eye strain. One way to do that is to use comfortable or subdued colors. To make sure things stay accessible, you need to make sure you’re providing a high enough contrast in digital environments, whether on laptops or smartphones. Using a more organic color palette with distinct contrast and finding a middle ground in soft color palettes will provide a less jarring experience. This trend overall may also help with shifting web design concerns more towards accessibility and comfort rather than dramatic visuals.

Typography

We’ve seen many old things become cool again, and font styles are no exception. Retro and vintage typography are being reimagined and merged with newer, bold styles. Instead of feeling old and stale, the combination of traditional, bold fonts and reimagined, retro fonts gives a bit of a cool and modern spin, while maintaining legibility. We’re looking forward to seeing more creative combinations for typography as 2021 unfolds.

Multimedia experiences

Using multimedia effectively and accessibly can create a richer user experience by bringing together visuals, text, video and/or audio to convey a message. Keep in mind, too much going on can be distracting or overwhelming. It’s important to determine and follow the necessary requirements to maximize inclusivity, such as including pause and play options, among others listed within the WCAG 2.1 Accessibility Guidelines.

Telehealth

One major tool that has risen this past year that’ll stick around in the post-pandemic world — telehealth or virtual care. It’s important to consider a clean, clear design. Make it easily accessible to site visitors and to provide a patient-first experience that best suits your organization. Make it a prominent element in your design and give it a permanent location for users to find consistently.

Personalized design and content

Preference or personalized design can range from changing a site’s appearance and navigation to offering unique, persona-based. Content created for users returning to your website can increase conversion and provide a more intuitive experience. A couple of examples may be to utilize geo-location to present the user with doctors or clinics closest in proximity to where the user lives or to display specific information on care and treatment services that the user often searches instead of the generic content seen by all users.

What’s Next?

While there are many design and UX trends that are appealing to implement, you should strategically evaluate and determine the best approach to meet the goals and needs of your organization, as well as provide the best patient-first experience for your users. Want help? Reach out to Geonetric for guidance from our design experts.

Luckily, this white paper outlines nine questions you can ask to find the perfect match for your organization’s unique needs! With its help, you can find an agency that will work with you to create and execute a content marketing plan that:

• Boosts your healthcare organization’s credibility, reputation, and brand recognition
• Improves SEO and complement paid digital advertising
• Motivates your target audience to take action and engage with your organization

Armed with the questions you need, you can hit the ground running and find a team that you can trust to plan, produce, and publish high quality content marketing assets to pushes your organization ahead.