You’ll hear from Lindsey Meyers, Vice President of Public Relations at Avera (Sioux Falls, SD), Patrick Kane, VP Marketing and Business Development, Cape Cod Healthcare (Hyannis, MA), and Matthew McKinney, Assistant Director, Digital Engagement, Cone Health (Greensboro, NC). Each represents organizations that took home honors in the competition in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Don’t miss this insightful roundtable where you’ll see real-life case studies on winning healthcare digital experiences and hear first-hand from candid leaders on what helped them succeed and what they wish they’d of known five years ago.

Watch this session and learn:

• What each leader did to make digital a priority in their organization
• What features, functionality, and investments made them winners in Modern Healthcare’s competition
• How that winning framework laid the foundation to use the web strategically during the COVID-19 pandemic
• What’s next for these forward-looking leaders and their teams

This insightful roundtable is part of Modern Healthcare’s 2020 Strategic Marketing Conference and is being replayed as a Geonetric webinar.

As marketers work to solidify their seat at the decision-making table and secure the budgets required for modern MarTech stacks, the need to justify those investments and show that they’re performing becomes more and more important. That’s why as we look at top healthcare digital marketing goals for our annual survey of the industry, we take a bit of a deep dive around tracking that ever-elusive ROI. Here’s what we found this year – and how it compares to last year’s results.

How important is ROI really?

As we look at the relative importance of different digital marketing goals overall, ROI (and most other financially-minded goals) falls in the middle of the pack, trailing more patient and consumer-focused goals but still ahead of goals relating to other audiences such as physician engagement, HR recruiting, and fundraising.

This isn’t equally true in all organizations. When looking at how digital leaders approach those goals compared to the average or laggards (respondents self-select into a segment based on how they view their digital marketing initiatives as compared to tactics), we see that financial measures, including ROI, are top goals for average organizations, falling just after patient acquisition.

It seems that digital leaders have more credibility and are less pressured to demonstrate a return on every digital marketing investment. Lagging organizations often lack the tools and infrastructure to measure, so it’s not an expectation. Organizations in the middle of the pack, digitally speaking, find themselves under the most pressure to deliver measurable ROI on their marketing investments.

Scale: -2 to +2

Ability to Demonstrate Impact of ROI

It’s one thing to have a goal and quite another to be able to deliver on it.  As we looked at how respondents are able to demonstrate that digital marketing is improving performance on those goals, a different story emerges. Leaders are also far more capable when it comes to demonstrating the impact of digital marketing on most of the listed goals, but not on ROI where those average organizations who are under pressure to deliver ROI are more able to do so.

That said, no goal showed as much year over year improvement as the ability to demonstrate ROI — which more than doubled — from .35 last year to .72 this year.

Scale: -2 to +2

Top Goals vs. Ability to Demonstrate Impact

Next, let’s look at the gap between organizations’ goal importance and their ability to demonstrate how digital marketing has impacted those goals.

In 2019, the financial metrics led this gap by a wide margin. This year is more mixed — profitability still remains elusive despite its importance, but patient satisfaction makes its way into the second position ahead of revenue.

However, ROI has closed the gap significantly and falls to the middle of the pack.

ROI Reporting

Although the ability to demonstrate ROI has improved in the last year, the lack of tools continues to lead the list of reasons why healthcare organizations fail to report this metric. The most interesting result this year, as it was in 2019, was reason #2 – organizations aren’t reporting ROI, in part, because no one is asking.

In fact, this year the percentage of respondents indicating a lack of interest in ROI has grown from 33% to 48%. On top of that, organizations that can measure ROI but it’s just positive has grown to 16% this year from 1.68% last year!

What’s this mean for you?

So it seems a lot of healthcare marketers are getting better at tracking ROI, but many of their executives still aren’t asking for it. It’s like the tree in the forest – if you track and no one’s there to see it, did it really happen?

The risk, of course, is that many marketers may be asked for the first time to justify their investments in a different way in this year of pandemic-induced financial woes and unprecedented budget cuts.  We strongly encourage healthcare marketers to work towards measuring ROI regardless if they’re being asked to do so and share this with stakeholders along with the other marketing metrics – and as marketing will be at the forefront of helping to recoup revenue after a year of shutdowns, you will be at a critical role to do just that.

Learn more in the full report

Be sure to download the full survey results report today and learn more about what success measurements today’s healthcare marketers are working towards and what barriers get in the way. If you need help setting and achieving digital marketing goals for your team, we can help.

How Intranet & Website UX Align

Intranets, like websites, are a digital experience. Users of both have expectations in their use, and many of those expectations align across audiences, from your colleagues and employees to your prospective patients and hospital visitors.

The best designs guide people to what they need

No matter where content lives on the site, well-thought design should help people complete tasks and find what they need, not hinder or distract them. Whether it’s a website or an intranet, a compelling design that’s intuitive to browse and easy to navigate is essential to a good user experience (UX).

People expect great online experiences

Nielsen Norman Group, an expert of user experience research, has found that web and intranet users tend to expect online experiences to mirror their favorite online brands. While this doesn’t mean your intranet or website should look and operate like Amazon or Facebook, it does mean your intranet and website should have intuitive navigation, accurate search results, and pleasing designs that are easy to use across devices.

Responsive design is still essential

Your patients are coming to your site from laptops, tablets, and phones. Your employees may be accessing the intranet or employee communications portal the same way. Limiting your intranet’s design to an antiquated, outdated format hinders your users’ abilities to find what they need when they need it.

People are task-oriented

Social media is for connecting with friends. Amazon and online shopping are for ordering goods and services. When it comes to healthcare, users on both the web and intranet are largely task based. They seek answers to questions, connection points to appointments and forms, or just checking off a box on their daily to-do list, like paying a bill or registering for an event.

Aside from user experience, some organizations have found it beneficial to build their intranet and website on the same platform, such as VitalSite. This is especially helpful for teams that manage the content for both experiences.

How Should My Intranet Be Different?

Your intranet should keep navigation clear and intuitive, and the design should be accessible across devices and meet the needs of your busy, frontline teams.

A well-designed intranet, even if built from a public website template, is better than no intranet or a poorly built one, but there are a few specific reasons why your intranet should have a different design experience than your public-facing website.

Audiences are different

It’s an obvious statement, but your audiences for the intranet are drastically different from that of your public website. Employees are far more task-oriented than prospective or current patients who are browsing your content to answer questions.

Where your public website is a place to spotlight your brand, your intranet should put tasks and resources front-and-center for quick access to help people get their job done. In fact, modern intranets have seen a pivot from document repositories and digital “filing cabinets” to more app-like experiences, with iconography and visual navigation that’s flexible and accessible across devices.

Not sure what your employees, colleagues, and teams need? Start with an employee survey to learn where your intranet is succeeding, and gaps where it could be improved.

User experiences are different

While it’s true your intranet UX should connect your employees to your overall healthcare brand, it should also serve as a connection to their colleagues and teammates throughout the organization.

Investing time and energy in important elements like employee directories can greatly impact not only employee morale and connection, but collaboration throughout your health system.

Likewise, as your health system grows and adds new clinics or hospitals, a location or facility directory can be an extremely helpful tool to help compartmentalize information for audiences in those walls.

Your intranet is a place for your organization to come together under one umbrella to do the best job they can. Design and user experience should be as unique as your organization and the people in it.

Content types are different

A content type, by Microsoft’s definition, is a reusable collection of data, workflow, behavior, and other settings to be used across a system. While your website has content types for provider and location profiles, events, and your service line pages, your intranet’s will be quite different, for example:

• Employee profiles – Likely require different fields from your provider profile, and more space for information that is pertinent to outside teams and colleagues
• Events – Employee events might not be classes like your public site has, but instead continuing education opportunities or on-call schedules for front-line teams to access daily
• Department pages – Not unlike service pages, department pages should explain what the department and team offers, but the information here will likely be different than a service line page for a prospective patient

Content types need consideration with design, which is why working with a designer and developer to create the most effective content types like these will result in a better and more usable intranet experience.

Aside from digital content types, you likely have far more files and documents to connect to your intranet than your public site, and those need consideration, too.

No matter the file types or content types you have, having an intranet content strategy for implementation, functionality, and ongoing governance is crucial to your lasting success.

Conversions (and metrics) are different

Your public site might be trying to invite and capture prospective patients, urging them to schedule an appointment or visit one of your clinics. But your intranet likely doesn’t have the same level of conversions.

Likewise, the return on investment (ROI) of your website might be scheduled appointments, increased patient volume, or donations to your hospital foundation. But your intranet metrics might not be as clear.

One thing’s for certain with intranets: The biggest conversion is employee engagement, which can be measured in a number of ways, such as:

• Page visits and access
• Session duration
• User path, or what pages or documents they click during visits
• Document downloads
• Event or class registration
• Newsletter, blog, or news release visits

Another great thing about redesigning your intranet is the less-analytical ROI, such as improved employee access, fewer calls to IT for intranet help, higher success of new hire training, and better employee self-service and independence for completing tasks or accessing tools.

Can My Intranet Mimic My Website?

If your employees are heavily engaged with your organization’s website, building an intranet design that mirrors your website may be a great way to connect the dots and get people to navigate the intranet more efficiently.

But there are other ways your intranet can mimic your website, too.

Brand recognition

Your brand – not just your colors and fonts – but your mission, purpose, and rally cry for your teams, should be as immersive on your intranet as your website, if not more so. That said, giving your intranet its own brand is a good way to build morale and familiarity with your intranet as one of the essential tools for every employee toolbox.

If you’re approaching an intranet redesign – especially coming from antiquated environments or document repositories like SharePoint – talk to stakeholders about how you can reimagine the intranet experience by giving it its own brand that links your public-facing organization to the missions you live out internally.

Henry Mayo in Valencia, Calif. did exactly that when they redesigned their intranet, HenryNet. Coming off the heels of a recent website redesign, the Geonetric team wove similar elements, such as a horizontal navigation and promotional spaces, into the intranet design experience.

Engage with content hubs

Your public-facing site might have a content hub or blog where you and your experts share information for healthy living, total wellness, or specialty care on a regular basis. You probably share this across your social media profiles, or even through email newsletters.

In the 2020s, healthcare will see an increased presence and need for content hubs on intranets, too. According to Gallup, nearly 74% of across industries employees don’t feel connected to company news, which negatively impacts employee engagement.

Instead of creating printed newsletters for breakrooms, organizations are moving them online into a digital content hub, making it easy for employees to read stories and explore topics relevant to them and their work. And with digital articles, it’s easy to build an email outreach funnel and monitor the engagement through click-throughs and page visits.

Tested, intuitive navigation & design

At Geonetric, we work hard to understand the needs of your core audiences for your public website, particularly prospective and current patients. With that research in hand, we recommend navigation structures, taxonomy, and page design that helps meet the needs of the modern healthcare consumer.

And when it comes to your intranet, you should put in the same level of research and detail.

In the many employee surveys we’ve conducted and analyzed over the years, some comments align time and time again:

• The intranet is hard to navigate and find what’s needed
• Search is confusing and doesn’t deliver accurate results
• Lack of information or outdated information, like employee profiles and departments, make it hard to connect with people when you need them

By implementing an employee survey – both pre- and post-launch of your redesigned intranet – you’ll keep a better eye on what your employees need to do their job confidently and efficiently.

The design you implement is just as important as the navigation, and in fact, supports the employee experience and engagement. A cluttered, mismanaged “junk drawer” of a homepage is going to be far less engaging and easy to digest than one that’s thoughtful and governed.

Get Your Intranet Up to Speed

Whether discussions for intranet redesigns have started in your organization or not, having points like these in hand is a great place to approach any project. If you’re looking for a partner who can guide you through a healthcare-specific intranet redesign, Geonetric is here to help. Contact us today set up a demo of VitalSite, or learn more about our intranet capabilities.

At Geonetric, we’ve done surveys with several hundred stakeholders and employees in health systems across the country, and poor design and user experience is a common complaint of outdated intranets.

In fact, poorly designed intranets account for millions in productivity dollars lost every year. Nielsen Norman Group estimates that companies can save $2 to $3 million per year by improving intranet usability.

Whether you’re an intranet decision maker at your organization, or just an everyday user, read on to learn more about the common design and usability trends for healthcare in the 2020s and beyond.

Branded Experience

Your intranet isn’t just a filing cabinet. It’s an online experience to help your employees do their jobs efficiently and confidently. Branding your intranet is a popular trend – and good practice – moving into the 2020s.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to have its own color palette and font family, but it should have a recognizable name and even a logo to help distinguish it as a tool that your employees use.

App-like Design

Now that smartphones are in nearly every pocket or purse in America, it’s not all that strange that employees and teams at your organization expect an app-like experience, especially on mobile devices.

While websites may not always work as apps, intranets often do because they’re task-oriented: It’s the place employees go to get things done.

So what does an app-like experience mean? In design, we like to break it down as:

• Responsive – No matter what size screen the user is on, the site works seamlessly and efficiently
• Grouped items – Streamline your navigation by grouping like things together, such as departments, events, and resources
• Expandable windows and menus – For when people just want things out of the way, expandable windows and menus make it easier for the user to find what they need on the screen
• Dynamic content – Keep necessary information updating automatically, if possible, including organization news and events, quality scores, or other important data for your employees

Online Forms

At one time, PDFs were the only option we had for forms on intranets. But these days, employees expect a seamless, intuitive online experience like they have with some of their favorite websites. That includes online forms.

Paper forms require resources, printing costs, and physical mailing or drop-off of the form to an internal mailbox. Online form submissions, however, can be automatically routed appropriately to the right team or person responsible. Better yet, online form programs like Formulate let you track the responses and follow up with partial completes to move things along.

When built well, online forms can increase conversion and ease the cognitive load on your users. Breaking up sections, providing helpful instructional text, and applying workflows and custom email responses makes it a helpful, valuable format for everyone.

Story Hubs for Employee Engagement

In the early 1990s, Bill Gates once said, “Content is king,” and since then, not much has changed. Content has driven the advancements we’ve seen in search engines and algorithms, and even how we interact with our favorite brands. Maybe your public website is already publishing blogs and patient stories.

But when it comes to intranets, storytelling and content writing is less about attracting SEO opportunities and more about increasing employee engagement. In fact, Gallup found that 74% of U.S. employees have a feeling they’re “missing out” on company news. And in healthcare, between shifts in the hospital or seeing patients round-the-clock in the clinics, there likely isn’t a lot of time to stop and chat these days.

A storytelling hub — or employee blog — is a great place to fill the gap.

This is where you can share stories about what’s happening in your organization, take story ideas from employees and volunteers, share healthy tips, or even invite employees to write their own stories to share.

Maybe you have a printed newsletter today — that’s a great place to start! Instead of using money on printing costs, move your newsletter online, making it accessible (and more easily browsable) by all employees at your health system.

Take a step further by giving employees the chance to subscribe to the online story center, where they can get weekly updates about new stories when they’re published.

Personalized Content

When it comes to intranet design, sometimes it helps to get out of the way. Rather than gathering a laundry list of links that covers every role or team, why not make the content personalized based on specific needs?

Solutions like Geonetric’s VitalSite offers the use of panels-by-role, which allows your administrators to establish groups of employees by permission and access. This lets you create custom panels of links and content that appear to users based on their login permissions.

These integrations cut down on cognitive load, which can quickly add up when employees are spent searching high and low for a link to a tool or document.

Robust Directories & Customizable Content Types

Keeping your employees informed and engaged is a must. But rather than keeping spreadsheets of names and data, build comprehensive directories to make it easier for employees to find what they need and take the next step. Customized directories and content types can help you build a structured experience that’s intuitive to search and digest.

The best part about directories and content types is you can control the type and layout of information in a consistent way. Each employee profile can have the same or similar fields; the same goes for locations and departments.

These directories can go a level further, connecting employees to specific location profiles, or connecting employee stories and blog posts to employee profiles.

Outside of profiles, think about the custom content types you may need  such as:

• Employee cafeteria menus
• How-to, tutorials, or instructional content
• Human resources policies
• Local business discounts
• System news or press releases

Don’t forget about an events calendar, too. Whether you need to display upcoming employee events and activities, continuing education classes, or even an on-call schedule, your calendar should give you plenty of options to make information easy to reach.

Cloud Hosting

Self-hosting is a thing of the past for intranets these days. Cloud hosting provides flexibility and growth-capabilities for any health system. Better yet, partnering with an organization that can cloud host your intranet and handle all the security and troubleshooting takes a burden off your information technology (IT) team.
In addition to cloud hosting benefits, be sure to ask your potential intranet partner about other important specifications, such as:

• Storage limits and locations
• Data backups
• Troubleshooting processes and resources
• Scheduled downtime
• Upgrades and improvements

Your partner should have full documentation that outlines their hosting solution and how it works with your healthcare system’s security needs.

Find a Flexible Intranet Solution

Health systems are constantly evolving and that includes yours. It’s more important than ever to find a flexible intranet solution that’s secure, developed, and well-managed. Learn more about what Geonetric’s intranet solutions and services can do for you, schedule a demo or contact us for information.

Check out this helpful video to walk away with a plan on how to take a strategic personalization approach and apply it to your website. You’ll get real direction on how to use tailored experiences to deliver business value and guidance that works whether you’re on Sitecore today, considering a move to Sitecore, or vetting other digital experience platforms.

If you’re like many hospitals and health systems, you’ve outgrown your current intranet. When the pandemic hit, it likely brought to light some of your intranet’s limitations – from missing functionality to content that’s hard to update, to the inability for employees to access critical information off-campus. Attend this webinar and learn the latest trends in modern intranets, top functionality you need to deliver a great user experience to your employees, and how to use storytelling and content marketing internally to build a community inside your organization.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How COVID-19 has turned employee intranet needs on its head
• Trends in modern intranets – for 2020 and beyond
• Top functionality in healthcare intranets and other findings from our 2020 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey
• How to use storytelling on your intranet as a vehicle for empathy, compassion, and community – with real healthcare examples

Many of the common complaints employees have with their intranets are multifaceted – difficult navigation, outdated or duplicate documents and forms, inaccessible from some devices (like their phones) – but most of them can be addressed with effective content strategy.

What is content strategy? We like this definition from content strategy pioneer Kristina Halvorson: “Content strategy guides your plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content.” It’s a way, she says, to make smart, informed decisions about content.

Content Strategy is Key to Your Intranet’s Success

Maybe you didn’t develop a formal content strategy when you launched your intranet. Or maybe you did, but after years of use, it’s time for an update.

In the 3^rd edition of their Intranet Usability Guidelines, Nielsen Norman Group estimates that the average annual cost to businesses for performing internal tasks on an intranet with poor usability is $13.4 million. And moving from an intranet with bad user experience to “average” can save organizations upwards of $4 million.

Here are 4 ways content strategy can take your intranet from drab to fab.

#1 – Use Surveys to Create Better User Experience

When it comes to intranets, it can be tricky to get the data you need to support the best user experience (UX) possible. That’s where user research comes in!

User Surveys

By creating a survey and sending it out to your employees, you can find out firsthand what is working and what needs improvement on your intranet.

At Geonetric, we’ve facilitated and collected data from hundreds of employees using surveys. One of the most interesting ways to present the data from these surveys can be a word cloud from the results.  Word clouds display a cluster of the most common words used across answers, with the most used displayed larger and more prominently.

Card Sorting

Card sorting helps your team think through groups of content types, which can help you organize your intranet. This is another exercise that helps you learn and best use the verbiage that your employees understand and make the organization of your intranet make sense to your users.

Analytics

Reviewing the data you have at your fingertips is essential to understand how your employees use your intranet. Looking at things like popular pages, search terms, and time spent on certain pages gives insight into your user experience on the intranet.

Usability Testing

Test your theories on what will help your users with usability testing. This gives you an opportunity to test and then iterate on the updates you’re planning to make. The results will help either confirm that your changes will be effective or, they may tell you to make adjustments so that your updates are even more helpful!

Identifying Pain Points

Often you find common threads of what your users are looking for on the intranet and what their pain points are.  This information can be helpful as you (or your content strategists) outlines what should be prioritized when you address the content strategy of your intranet.

Data like this can help create a user-centered intranet, tailored to the unique needs and culture of your organization, and one that creates a more intuitive tool to help your employees, teams, and leaders do their jobs more efficiently.

Stay Informed About Experience After You Make Changes

Ongoing surveys – even temperature checks, pulse surveys, etc. – are tracked to better employee engagement. Gallup notes a 21% increase in profitability for an organization when employees are engaged. So consider using your new, friendlier intranet to stay in touch with what your employees want and need, both on the intranet and more broadly. This is also a helpful way to make sure that the changes you’ve made are effective and quickly find future opportunities for improvement.

#2 – Create a User-Friendly Navigation & Information Architecture

The hard work that goes into research will be helpful in more ways than one. For example, it can also help you make your intranet more intuitive to navigate.

How? Well, the insight from employee responses to the survey and card sorting will show you the words they use to refer to things like documents, departments, and policies. These tools are crucial for employees, so make them easy to find by using familiar language. That also means fewer frustration points and feelings of “I can’t ever find what I want!” for your users. Instead, you can boost productivity, creating a better experience for your employees.

A Powell Software study found that 50% of employees are design-focused – but often times users will refer to elements of content strategy as design! Therefore, if your intranet is not intuitive or easy to use in its “design,” less than half of its users will find it useful or return to it on a regular basis. So, there’s a real benefit to making sure your intranet plans and provides for your users’ individual needs and wants.

A large part of that benefit is that your content strategy will help you determine top task and needs of your users. Then, on the new site, you can create easy-to-follow paths to the information and tools that your employees and colleagues need on a daily basis.

Sometimes, it pays to have an agency come in to help you prioritize this, because they’re not engrossed in internal politics for your organizations. An outside content strategist, for example, brings industry knowledge and insights based on the research they do about your organizations. And they’ll help you honestly re-evaluate your intranet’s architecture and make sure you’re providing a user-friendly navigation and experience throughout.

#3 – Functionality is Key

Content strategy can help you understand how to use your CMS’s features to their full potential. That means less work for your team and a better experience for your users.

For example, if your documents and essential files are stored in a tool that sorts them alphabetically, you may find this structure and functionality makes it easier for employees to find what they need. An effective site search for your intranet is also a valuable tool that prevents frustration and enables employees to complete their goals.

Your intranet doesn’t have to envelop each and every tool or app your employees use. In fact, it shouldn’t. However, it should be your cohesive, neatly packaged front door to give employees news, events, and access to the everyday tools they use to do their jobs.

#4 – Content Governance to Keep Files Relevant and Up-to-Date

A solid content governance plan is crucial to keeping your intranet useable and relevant.

Content governance is a “discipline that focuses on establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy, and standards.”

The great thing about content governance is that it gives you the framework and the tools to help you keep your website – or intranet – up-to-date. With content governance, you’re set up to:

• Facilitate conversations about team roles and responsibilities help teams work more efficiently and effectively
• Document workflows for content updates and document standards (like core content strategy statements and style guides) to support consistency and efficiency
• Create tools to assist with planned content updates (e.g., a content maintenance calendar) and unplanned content updates (e.g., a request form)

Your content strategist can help you create an approach that includes a core group of super users to make this task a little easier to manage. That group can also work to establish a workflow, outlining who reviews documents and who approves them so that everyone is on the same page and everything stays up to date.

The Time to Start is Now

When it comes to your intranet, it’s never been more crucial to have it in working order. It’s an important part of communicating with your staff during a public health crisis like COVID-19.

If tackling your intranet seems daunting, especially with changing priorities due to the pandemic, a partner could be key in getting the project up and running. Contact Geonetric to get the help you need to ensure your intranet is the effective tool it can and should be.