Join thought leaders Ben Dillon and David Sturtz for this webinar and learn healthcare digital marketing predictions for 2021 and how COVID-19 has either accelerated or reduced momentum around initiatives.
From the digital domination of hospital marketing spend to what do with pent up demand and the effects of delayed care on your community, you’ll walk away with ideas on how to better prepare and succeed in 2021.
Mistrust in vaccines isn’t new. In a December 2019 Gallop poll, 11% of U.S. adults said they believe vaccines are “more dangerous than the diseases they prevent.”
But the number of Americans who are hesitant to take a COVID-19 vaccine is even greater. In May, the Associated Press and the University of Chicago released a study showing 50% of Americans were either hesitant or unwilling to take a COVID-19 vaccine. The number of Americans willing to get vaccinated has only risen to 60% recently.
“Based on public opinion research… we think somewhere around 30% of Americans intend to refuse a coronavirus vaccine once one becomes available,” said Matthew Motta, assistant professor of political science at Oklahoma State University, in an interview aired by NPR’s On the Media in December.
As a healthcare marketer and communications professional, you’re facing an uphill battle addressing various objections effectively. The U.S. needs at least 60 to 70% of the public to be immunized to reach herd immunity and restore our society to a semblance of normalcy.
The good news? The pandemic has led to generally increased trust and respect of local hospitals, health systems, medical groups, and providers across the U.S. An August 2020 poll reported more than 80% of Americans see doctors, nurses, health systems, and their local hospitals as “somewhat” or “very” trustworthy. You have an advantage over national resources: government agencies, including the FDA and CDC, were ranked at least 10% lower.
There’s a wide range of reasons driving reluctance to this specific vaccine. How do we reach those various groups most effectively?
You’re the expert of your organization and target audiences. To identify objections and misinformation:
With the caveat generalizations about demographic groups aren’t always the best way to look at populations, they may be somewhat revealing in this specific situation. According to Professor Motta and other sources, certain groups are less likely to report comfort or likelihood to get vaccinated. Those groups include:
There are likely many systemic and societal reasons for this — poor past healthcare experiences attributed to misogyny or racism, scientific studies historically not including women or people of color in drug and treatment trials or performing treatments on them without informed consent, inaccessibility of the latest and best care due to cost, the hyper-politicization of the American healthcare landscape, etc.
To make your messaging as strategic as possible, analyze the demographics of your target audiences. Tailor your messaging and language about the vaccine to reassure them and meet their concerns head-on. For example:
Different groups of people respond to different messaging due to their psychology, world views, and other factors. Once you have your list of your target audiences’ objections, analyze them and create specific responses tailored to resonate with the same people raising the objection. We’ve created a few examples below to show you how to get started.
Even before the pandemic, healthcare communicators fought against the debunked perceived link between childhood immunizations and autism, as well as general opposition to immunizations of any kind. However, “anti-vaxxers” make up only a small portion of those concerned about the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. Many people who typically trust science and vaccinations report concern with this vaccine specifically.
How to respond: Lead with empathy. A consumer who finds the vaccine suspect understandably cares deeply about the health and safety of themselves or their child — and that’s why they should get the vaccine, to protect themselves and their kids from a potentially deadly virus.
People who identify as Democrats report mistrust of this vaccine specifically due to the presidential administration it was developed under.
How to respond: Overcome the partisan divide. Take a page from former presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton. Consider recruiting community leaders who represent a variety of political views to be part of your marketing, such as a video showing them receiving the vaccine together or appeal to civic duty and responsibility by talking about the importance of getting vaccinated as “the right thing to do” to save lives and improve public health.
Did the vaccine receive the customary safety trials? Can I really trust something developed by a private pharmaceutical company to have my best interests at heart instead of their bottom line?
How to respond: Explain in easily understood language the rigorous processes the vaccines have gone through to reach approval. Underscore the vaccine was developed quickly because of the unprecedented need for its widespread availability to save lives.
How to respond: Put the risks of the vaccine in understandable context.
Getting vaccinated prevents something more unpleasant than minor side effects: a severe or potentially fatal case of the coronavirus, or spreading the virus to others. Be transparent about the vaccine’s potential side effects, but make sure to emphasize they’re typically mild.
Thousands of people get the flu vaccine each year though it’s typically only about 40 to 60% effective. The COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be more than 90% effective at preventing severe disease, but their newness drives anxiety. If you’ve received a flu vaccine, messaging that compares the higher efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine may be convincing, as well as noting adverse vaccine side risks typically manifest in two to three months after inoculation, and the COVID-19 vaccines studies have studied participants for longer time frames than that.
How to respond: Make the risks of not getting vaccinated real.
In addition to the risk of getting sick, potentially dying, or spreading the disease to others, 30% of people who have survived COVID-19 report chronic, long-term health problems, and that group includes people under 35 with no previous health problems. Vaccination is safer than natural immunity.
Read writing tips and tactics for sharing COVID-19 vaccination information with:
Watch our webinar about getting started with your external and internal vaccination messaging, whether you’re a small-but-mighty one-man-band or a larger team.
Add experts to your bench. Geonetric’s content strategists, writers, and digital marketers are ready to help you analyze and optimize your coronavirus communications. Visit our COVID-19 resources hub for more articles and support.
For many, the most convincing argument to get vaccinated is a sense of duty to others. Consider:
Make your coronavirus vaccine content clear, convincing, and actionable to people in your community by following these guidelines:
Certain COVID-19 vaccinations require a second injection. If your organization is offering this type, messaging this clearly will be critical to the effectiveness of your vaccination efforts.
Make sure your internal team is on the same page. Follow our recommendations for educating your internal audiences about your vaccination efforts, as well as the messaging you want to share with patients, your community, and local media.
View a free webinar to see more strategic recommendations about supporting your coronavirus vaccination efforts through your marketing and communications, or contact us today to learn how we can help.
Discover additional resources related to the COVID-19 pandemic in our dedicated resources hub
Vaccinating healthcare workers and other segments of the population against COVID-19 will be the biggest public health effort of its kind in our history. Initially, there will be limited supply compared to the immediate, high demand. And distributing, storing, scheduling, vaccinating, and tracking is a huge task.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel made recommendations in early December to give healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents the first vaccine doses.
There’s no question about the need to provide the nearly 21 million healthcare workers early access to the vaccine based on their exposure. The duty of communicating to them about the immunization process at your health system will fall to you as your organization’s communication team.
The CDC and its partners are already planning the vaccines’ delivery operations and recommended timelines. The government’s preplanning means the vaccine will roll out very quickly after FDA approval.
Reduce confusion and stop the inadvertent spread of misinformation with a solid internal communication plan about the vaccine. Make your organization the hub for accurate, timely messages.
Prepare communications now to:
As you know, this is a stressful time for healthcare professionals. Your staff will appreciate reminders about support and assistance in place to help them cope, such as:
Throughout the pandemic, you’ve been able to identify the best channels to communicate with your internal audiences. Perhaps it’s your employee intranet, weekly publications, staff meetings, or regular emails. Many of our healthcare clients favor using their intranet for timely, cost-effective messaging.
Keep your messaging simple and easy to understand. Simple messaging helps stop misinformation from spreading. Timestamp your communications to allow people to easily identify the most current information.
Now is the time to start moving important vaccine information out quickly and effectively to your internal team. See additional tips for communicating to internal audiences during a public health crisis from March 2020.
Creating and following a plan is hard when news about the vaccine approval and delivery changes day-by-day. Flexibility is key to reducing chaos. Arm your organization with accurate and timely information and ways to adjust messaging rapidly and delivery channels when needed.
Anticipate the information your internal teams want to know about COVID-19 vaccines and communicate it proactively. Start with the CDC’s Frequently Asked Questions about COVID-19 Vaccination page.
If you need more insight, ask your front-line clinical leaders what questions or concerns they’ve heard from their teams about the COVID-19 vaccination. You could also use keyword research to guide your question development. Possible questions include:
As vaccine information evolves, continue to update your internal team on topics such as:
Questions will arise even with the most informative communication plan. Listen and try to understand concerns about the vaccines. Use your intranet or a dedicated email to allow employees to submit vaccine questions and get answers promptly.
To save your team from answering questions more than once, create informative content on your intranet with answers to the most common questions. Most of the time, we favor this approach over creating Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages. However, a prioritized list of fewer than 20 questions and answers could be useful for your staff.
Be transparent about the messages your organization is releasing to patients, the community, and the media. This helps your internal team share correct information with the public. Your internal teams will value hearing from you first, not from news stations or social media.
As your plan for providing vaccines to the public firms up, update your staff about their involvement. This will prepare them for their participation in your plans. Vaccination education might be necessary to train staff to answer questions from people receiving the vaccine.
Reach out to Geonetric for content services to support your team’s response to the coronavirus. And explore our COVID-19 resources hub.
Local health systems have a major role to play in not only providing Coronavirus vaccinations but also in combatting misinformation. In May, the Associated Press and the University of Chicago released a study showing that 50% of Americans were either hesitant or unwilling to take a COVID-19 vaccine. Couple that with the fact that Americans trust their local healthcare organizations more than ever before, and your hospital is poised to be a key player in answering your community’s top vaccine-related concerns.
Join David Sturtz, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, along with experts Stella Hart, Web Content Strategist & Writer, and Tim Lane, Director, Digital Marketing, for a timely discussion to help your marketing team hit the ground running. You’ll walk away with expert advice on battling general mistrust around COVID-19 and vaccinations and effectively sharing accurate information with your community.
Attend this webinar and learn how to:
You probably remember a time when SEO wasn’t focused on human readers. But as search algorithms become more complex and sophisticated, optimizing content for search engines has become more about creating findable, quality content that real people value. When you’re trying to deliver the information your audience wants and understands, SEO is an essential tool for success.
Consider this your guide for writing a page that competes in online searches and provides relevant information to your users.
Choose one specific topic to explore on your page. This will help you optimize the page later for search terms. Focusing your topic also lets you provide the depth needed to answer users’ questions and fully communicate what your organization needs audiences to know.
To give your content direction, try to sum up in a sentence:
Then, you can determine what information you need on the page to support that message or call to action.
It’s important to determine early where your content will live on your site, especially if you write your pages directly in your content management system (CMS).
When you choose a place for your content to live on your site, you’re giving Google and other search engines clues about that page’s topic and its relationship to other site content. You should group related information and place content where it fits best for the user journey, but be aware that your decision can impact where the page ranks in search engine results.
The site structure is what web crawlers, like Googlebot, look at when indexing a site in order to return it in search results. Having an intentional site structure improves the user experience and also allows search engines to better understand your content. Another pro of a strong site structure is site links in search engine results pages, giving you more real estate and giving users a clear understanding of related links to what they are searching for.
Make sure your content is reachable through at least one link. Orphans, or pages that don’t have any inbound links, can be hard to find and hard for search engines to categorize.
Finally, if you move or delete a page, redirects are key. Think of a redirect as letting the post office know that you’re moving — it makes sure things don’t get lost in the shuffle. It also helps search engines pass the authority you built up on your previous pages onto your new pages. So if a page moves somewhere else on your site, set up a redirect from the old URL to the new address. If you delete a page, try to find a relevant page on your site to redirect the old URL.
This is one of the most valuable steps you can take for SEO. You can put your term or topic into a keyword research tool and find out what related terms or phrases people search for online and how often they search. That means you don’t have to speculate about what people are searching for, what questions they’re asking, or even what words they use to describe what they want.
Use the results of keyword research as one factor to help you determine what to cover on a page and what specific terms to use. Doing so can boost your pages ranking in results for common queries.
Some of the most commonly used keyword research tools are:
Any of those tools can help you better understand your users’ search habits. Most require payment to access all their features, but if you use them regularly and apply what you learn, they’re worth the investment.
With any of those great tools, you’ll likely find lots of keywords to consider. But you probably can’t (and shouldn’t) use all of them. When you’re choosing which ones to use in your writing, consider:
One important place to include keywords is in the metadata you write. Metadata briefly describes the content of the page and helps search engines determine when to display it to people searching online. There are two main types of metadata to consider: HTML page titles and meta descriptions.
When you write your HTML title, include a keyword (preferably high-volume) that accurately describes the topic of your page. Make sure your site doesn’t have another page with the same title — that will confuse search engines and make your pages compete against each other for rankings.
Most search engines will display about 60 characters in results listings, so make sure your page title is around 65-75 characters with spaces. If the title needs to go a little over, that’s okay — search engines won’t penalize you, they just may not show the full title. Instead, make sure to frontload the most important information in your page title.
Consider this formula when writing your HTML page titles:
Page Topic/Keyword | Geographic Location | Organization Name
For example, Chemotherapy | Cedar Rapids, IA | Benefit Cancer Center
Use this your chance to “sell” your content. Although Google doesn’t consider the content of the description as a ranking factor, this metadata may entice users to click on your page in search results, and Google does look at the click-through-rates of results in their ranking formula.
It’s valuable to include keywords in your meta descriptions. If your keywords match a user’s query, they will often be bolded in search results. That emphasis can help catch a user’s attention as they skim results.
Usually, Google results pages will display up to about 175 characters, including spaces. Try to write within this limit.
Meta descriptions can also benefit from a simple formula. Consider using this formula when writing your meta descriptions:
[Action] + [Organization/Facility Name] [Geographic Location] [Benefit]For example: “Reach your health goals at Benefit Health Fitness in Cedar Rapids, IA, where you’ll find support from certified athletic trainers to stay in shape.”
Getting users to your content is only the first step — you also need to keep users on your page. Search engines pay attention when users click and then quickly bounce back to search results.
So follow these tips to keep users engaged and encourage them to stay on your site:
For even more information on optimizing your content, make sure to check out our writing for the web video — which offers in-depth training on making your content readable and accessible.
After you publish your page, you want evidence that people are finding it through search. Consider monitoring:
Keep in mind that it’ll take time before you start to see the SEO boost that you’re trying to achieve — Google has said that it can take months. You can always request a Google crawl to make sure Google is taking your new page content into account.
The time to get started on SEO improvements to your copy is now. Remember, your SEO work is never done — but if you keep your audience in mind as you approach your content, you will be building an excellent foundation for content that search engines like.
If the idea of making or measuring changes seems a little tricky, get an expert’s advice — contact us today! Our SEO and content specialists handle these matters every day, and they’re excited to help you get your search rankings where they need to be.
A rebrand – or, at minimum, a brand refresh. Some organizations just want a more modern look, others need to update their name, logo, or color palette due to a merger or acquisition. While full rebrands tend to only happen every 7-10 years, refreshes happen more frequently, with updates to typography or colors happening every 3-5 years.
The user experience has become more fragmented as users move from device to device and medium to medium. With most patient journeys beginning and ending with digital, it’s essential to have a sound, all-encompassing design guide that provides governance for bringing your brand to life and delivering one seamless brand experience to all users.
From a strategic perspective, take stock of your core business, the audience you’re trying to reach, your competitive environment, and your differentiators. Armed with this 360-degree view of what your site needs to accomplish, you’re ready to think through some of the ways your site can support patients.
Learn how to create a clear picture of the end-to-end patient journey for your most important services. At the end of the day, your website must focus on the healthcare consumer journeys that drive your business.
When you know it’s time for a change, you still have many options. Should you refresh, redesign, or re-platform? It’s important to understand what each of these efforts can accomplish and what would work best for your medical group. You’ll also get tips for getting buy-in from other stakeholders.
Internal communications took center stage this year. Connecting with your care team became a top priority – one that likely won’t go away any time soon. For many organizations, this gave them a chance to evaluate and improve their intranets and other digital employee communication tools. As you review your platform and plan for enhancements, download the State of Healthcare Intranets white paper and learn:
Every year when we embark on our Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey, we do a deep dive into staffing. From team sizes, to team structure, to top areas for staffing investments, healthcare marketers are hungry for data on how their teams stack up.
Understanding staffing needs and what skill sets need to be represented on a team are imperative to digital marketing success. It’s important to note as you review this data, respondents were self-selected into the roles of leader, average, and laggard, based on how they responded to the question: “Are you ahead or behind your competitors?” across 21 functional areas including website design, social media, and digital advertising.
Let’s see what this year’s data says and healthcare digital marketing teams – and how it compares to past years.
When looking at mean team sizes, leaders have 19 full-time equivalents (FTEs), average organizations have 13 FTEs, and laggards have 8 FTEs. And, while it’s important to note leaders tend to be bigger organizations, these size differences account for only a portion of the differences in team sizes.
This is similar to 2019 results where leaders had the largest teams with 20 FTEs while average organizations reported 11 FTEs, and laggards reporting 9.25 FTEs.
Although bed size isn’t always the most meaningful way to compare organizations, it does give a basis to evaluate team sizes and it was one we used in 2019. Overall, teams had a median size of 3.5 FTEs per 100 beds.
For the majority of respondents – 51% – digital marketing is most often integrated into a centralized marketing function. When that doesn’t happen, digital marketing is most likely to be a standalone team (32%) or live on a team that is distributed by facility or region (8%).
That question wasn’t asked in 2019, but we did ask about department ownership. Across all respondents, the person charged with guiding digital marketing tactics most likely lives in the marketing department. Outside of marketing, the percentages vary. Within the C-suite, executives from communications, I.T., and finance can play significant roles.
Overall, email and marketing automation and video production have the highest planned net increase in staffing.
However, looking at each unique segment tells a different story. Leaders are investing in digital advertising, digital strategy, mobile app development, and SEO. Average organizations are investing in marketing automation, CRM, intranets, digital strategy, and content marketing. Laggards are focusing on hiring more in the areas of video production, website management, content development, and CRM.
The single biggest area of growth for 2019 by a wide margin was digital advertising, followed by digital strategy, video production, content marketing and development, and CRM.
When looking at areas organizations overall are most likely to outsource, web hosting and web development top the list followed by digital advertising and web design. Areas where leaders are more likely to outsource than their average and laggard counterparts include local search or business listing management and content marketing.
In 2019, efforts most likely to be outsourced were digital advertising (including paid social and search), web design, web development, and web hosting. It was also noted in 2019 that leaders tended to outsource more than their average and laggard counterparts in the areas of mobile app development, email or marketing automation, analytics, local search, and business listing management.
Staffing is just a small snippet of the data available in the full report. Download it today and learn more about how digital marketing in healthcare gets done.
If you’re reading this and upset your team is much smaller than your peers, we’d love to help. Many clients use us as an extension of a lean internal marketing team and our subject matter experts will make sure your digital marketing tactics are setting you up for success.
And if you have ideas on survey questions you want included next year or you want to be part of our popular Advisory Board, drop a line to hello@geonetric.com with the subject line, “Digital Marketing Survey.”
