When buy-in is critical to your success and you have to prove your return on investment (ROI), you need to report data in a way that anyone can understand, without requiring them to take a course in data analytics.

Join Tim Lane, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist at Geonetric, as he shares tips and tricks to data visualization honed by working with hospitals and health systems of all sizes and across diverse markets. You’ll leave with actionable ideas for how to tell a story with your data.

He’ll dive into Google’s Data Studio as well as lesser-known plug-ins that will answer your top questions around data, including how to:

• Know what data you should include in reports
• Tell when you should use comparative data
• Choose the right format, such as table or chart, to tell your story
• Take advantage of filters to create dynamic graphics
• Integrate data from multiple sources
• Select plugins that will help you tell the full story
• Prove that ever-elusive ROI

Types of accessibility tools

There are two different kinds of tools that can check your hospital website for accessibility errors.

1.) Browser plugins or extensions: These allow you to evaluate one page of your website at a time, and are effective if you are making edits to one specific page.

2.) Automated site crawlers: These are tools that crawl your entire site, listing every single error it finds in one report.

Both of these types of tools are valuable depending on your needs. They give you quick results, don’t require technical expertise in order to use them, and can provide a roadmap of some top areas in which you may need to invest.

But it’s important to understand that even the best tools only find about 37% of your accessibility problems.

That’s because these tools check your code to make sure certain elements and tags exist, but they cannot determine if those elements are meaningful, relevant, or understandable to an end user.

Why accessibility tools alone fall short

Here’s an example from a healthcare website’s mission page.

In the screenshot above are the words, “Actions speak louder than words” followed by an image of a young girl extending her arms and using her hands to make a heart shape. Below the image are more paragraphs of text talking about the organization’s commitment to delivering patient-centered healthcare.

Upon inspecting the HTML code, we can see that this image has an empty alt tag.

<img src="/util/images/mission-and-values.jpg" alt="">

If you were to run this page through an accessibility checker tool, it would flag this image for not having alt text. Now let’s pretend you were editing this page to make it more accessible, and you added alt text to say “Girl” then ran the testing tool again.

This time the tool would NOT flag the image because it does include alt text. However, the alt text “Girl” isn’t very descriptive and doesn’t convey the author’s intent of this image, therefore it does not meet WCAG guidelines.

The image was put on this page for a reason. The author was trying to evoke some kind of feeling or send some kind of visual message. If we do not adequately describe what is in this image, a person with little or no vision will miss out.

Web accessibility requires tools plus human judgment

Web accessibility tools are an effective way to start evaluating your site. They automate a lot of manual testing and help you see where you have opportunities to improve. They also give you an idea of the amount of time and resources you’re going to need to allocate.

As the alt text example highlighted, human intervention is still required to review the output of the reporting tools and determine if what’s there is meaningful to the user. An accessibility expert can also review the report and help put a plan in place to tackle any issues based on what changes will produce the most value while taking into consideration what user paths are most popular on your site.

Remember, at the end of the day accessibility is about real humans creating optimal experiences for real humans.

If you’d like to learn more about web accessibility in healthcare, including how to best use tools and humans (internal or external team members) to recreate an accessibility action plan, check out this webinar: Website Accessibility in Healthcare.

And it matters even more for the healthcare industry, as access to care is your top priority. As your organization works to enhance the user experience, it’s important to put a plan in place to ensure people with disabilities — such as those with color blindness or hearing loss – can still interact with your hospital’s site. Ensuring your website works with assistive technologies isn’t just the right thing to do — recent lawsuits are making more healthcare organizations take notice of accessibility guidelines and best practices.

Join Amanda Gansemer, Senior Web Designer and Developer, Geonetric, and Kevin Rydberg, Senior Digital Accessibility Consultant, Siteimprove, as they dig into why hospitals should be investing in accessibility and how to get started. You’ll learn:

• The opportunities and risks associated with accessibility and the web
• What it means to be accessible
• An overview of important standards and why they matter
• The tools available to help you understand how accessible your site is — or isn’t
• How to create an accessibility plan to achieve short-term goals as well how to develop strategies for long-term success within your organization

Over 10,000 people turn 65 each day. This trend is expected to continue until 2029 when the youngest baby boomers turn 65 years old. Aging baby boomers, along with the high cost of senior care living, are creating millions of caregivers.

While the numbers vary widely – from 34.2 million up to 65 million – the fact is there is a huge population of siblings, children, and loved ones who are reported to provide care for a chronically ill, disabled, or aged family member or friend.

This is a growing and important audience to remember in your healthcare marketing, as they are making care decisions every day for their loved ones.

Caregiving is personal

I’ve seen caregiving first-hand because my mom has always been a caregiver, whether paid or unpaid.

She raised my brother and me as a stay-at-home mom until age 39 when she went back to school to become a registered nurse. After graduation, she worked primarily in senior living and geriatric care. In 2014, she retired.

But by that time my grandma, Eleanor, was nearly 90 years old. She was a strong and mentally sharp independent woman, still living at home,  but she did not drive and she had a few health problems heading her way. Grandma’s healthcare became my mom’s post-retirement job.

When I’d call my mom to chat, I’d ask how she was doing.

“Tired,” she’d say. “I’ve been up since 7 o’clock this morning. I had to drive Grandma to her doctor, and the podiatrist, and change her wound dressing. I still have to get her groceries and do both of our laundries at home. I just don’t have the energy.”

I can’t count how many times I heard those sighs. I wanted to push my city and my hometown together so I could be there to help her.

Grandma passed away in March 2018. I miss her every day, and so does Mom. But as we said goodbye, and I watched my mom find life after being a caregiver, I wondered what could’ve helped my mother feel less alone, less stressed, and more in control of her life and the new expectations placed on her.

Caregivers are a vital, often  missed audience

It’s easy to throw caregivers into one big group, highlighting their stress and fatigue. But while that’s true for many, how caregivers respond to stress and fatigue varies. What answers they need to cope with this tremendous responsibility varies, too.

A recent survey by Syneos Health Communications estimated there are 43.5 million people who provide unpaid care to adults. On average, caregivers devote around 41 hours a week to providing care to their loved ones.

That’s more than a full-time job.

In the survey, 1,380 caregiver participants said hospital brands don’t understand their journey as well as individual doctors and nurses. They describe their feelings as being “drained,” and “lost,” as well as “hopeless and lonely.” It’s a tough position to be in – and one that is often overlooked in healthcare marketing.

So what, as healthcare communicators, can we do with this information?

Create marketing and events aimed at caregivers

It feels uncomfortable to put “caregivers” and “marketing” in the same sentence. But caregivers use search engines to find answers and support. Wouldn’t it be great if caregivers could find articles and information that could help make their lives easier?

Creating blogs and content that help caregivers make decisions and find relief or support services to assist them is a huge benefit to offer. They’re as important to the patient journey as the patient, so don’t shy from creating content for them.

TV commercials, radio, billboards or magazine advertisements are also important. This audience is as likely to engage so long as the ad speaks to them and their experience.

Your organization could also take it a step further by offering caregiver support through events and special spaces at your hospital. Find a way to bring caregivers together to share experiences and build relationships.

Mercy Cedar Rapids actually built family caregiving services into its medical service lines. A webpage for the center features services available to caregivers and families, including counseling, support groups, art therapy, and more. They also feature a tour of their comfortable, inviting caregiver center, and encourage those inspired by caregiving to donate to the Mercy foundation.

Choose images with thoughtfulness and context

According to the Syneos survey, caregivers view images with an emotional pull.

“Non-caregivers gave a superficial, very literal report of what they were seeing,” the survey states. “Caregivers, on the other hand, read more emotion into what they saw and projected their experience onto the imagery.”

Take a look at this image:

A non-caregiver might describe it as, “holding hands with senior.” But a caregiver might describe it as, “a young person nurturing an older person.” As Syneos pointed out, caregivers project their experiences onto content they read. Considering how they’ll interpret images is important as you choose them for the content you create.

Besides images in your content marketing, consider other graphic approaches to speaking to this audience. Cone Health, in Greensboro, NC, featured an article, “5 Stress Relief Tips for Caregivers,” with a cheerful, easy-to-read infographic to accompany their advice.

And by building caregivers into the target audience of their content marketing hub, Wellness Matters, they’re capturing opportunities to help this ever-important audience feel involved. Even an article about exercising with arthritis speaks to how caregivers can help.

Don’t hide the potential solutions

Like patients, caregivers are looking for answers and options. Since this often starts online, don’t hide the next steps. Lead them to the call-to-action that will make their life easier.

The Syneos survey also states that caregivers are “micro-influencers” for patients. In fact, more than 75 percent will influence when and how their loved one sees a medical professional, and nearly 70 percent of them will seek second opinions.

This trend has only grown. In 2013, the Pew Research Center found that nearly half of online health searches were performed on behalf of someone else.

Leading a patient to conversion is one thing, but with this growing audience of caregivers, it’s essential that every piece of your marketing – even your physician profiles – helps them make decisions for family members who need care, especially they are seeking that care from out-of-state.

As you develop content, make calls-to-action that are clear and speak to this audience. Whether they’re seeking the best medical supplies or finding a new doctor for a loved one, caregivers are part of the consumer funnel.

You’ll help more people than you realize

In retrospect, I wish I could turn back the clock and change two things: To inspire confidence in my Mom to help her find answers to questions about her own caregiver needs, and more importantly, that I could’ve been closer to home to help her find the resources to ease her stress.

Even if a caregiver isn’t the one sitting on the exam table, they play a major part in the healthcare outcomes for your patients. By including content that speaks to the caregiver experience and challenges, you’re doing more good than you realize.

And isn’t that why we’re here in the first place?

1. Your site has a technical issue preventing the page from ranking

I’m surprised how often I review a hospital’s site only to uncover technical issues that are preventing search engines from indexing the pages.

The most typical issue I run across is the “meta noindex tag.” This is a line of code that tells search engines not to index the page in search. In other words, the page will not appear when you search for it in Google. This line of code is often triggered by a checkbox or similar feature within the content editor of your content management system (CMS), which is why problems arise when you have many editors or unfamiliar users updating your website.

The meta noindex tag looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

If you’re curious whether a page has this tag, view the page’s source code and search for “noindex.” Another place the “noindex” directive might appear is within the HTTP response header.

Note that there are occasions where using a “noindex” tag to hide a page from search makes sense. For example, a campaign landing page that you only want to direct paid traffic to, or utility pages such as a form submission confirmation page.

While checking the source code of a page may work in one-off situations, it’s better to use a tool like Moz, SiteImprove, or Screaming Frog to perform a crawl of your site. This will give you a nicely-structured report of all pages that contain ‘noindex,’ as well as other issues that affect SEO.

If you do find a page with a “noindex” tag that you want to be indexed, remove the tag (or ask your web vendor how), and request Google to index the page within Google Search Console. Then, have a conversation with your team or establish an SEO governance plan to prevent these issues from arising in the future.

2. Your page topic doesn’t align with your targeted keyword

The second reason a page may not rank for a keyword is that your content isn’t effectively targeting your chosen keyword. In other words, Google doesn’t see your page as a good answer to the question users are searching for. Google always strives to serve the most relevant content to a user. So if you have a page called “Classes” and you’re trying to rank for a search for “birthing classes,” your page topic isn’t specific enough.

Ideally, the topic of your page and your chosen keyword should be identical or closely align. How does Google know the topic of your page? The text appearing in your page’s URL, HTML page title, and H1 are the first places Google looks to understand your page topic. That’s why you have to make careful decisions about what keywords you place in those critical areas.

The other reason your page may not be relevant enough is you’re trying to target too many keywords with one page. Are you trying to rank for “birthing classes,” “prenatal yoga,” and “birth center tours,” with a single page? If it’s important for your organization to rank well for each of these searches, these topics should be broken out into separate pages – each with their own URL, HTML page title, and H1 where you can place these valuable keywords.

When deciding whether to target multiple keywords with a page, think about the user’s intent and what they would expect to find. A user searching for “prenatal yoga” wants very different information than someone searching for “birthing classes.” But a user searching for “bariatric surgery” wants the same information as someone searching for “weight loss surgery,” so these keywords can be targeted by the same page. This mental exercise will help you to ensure that you’re building pages with the most relevant information for your search query and providing a good experience for your users. Now you’re thinking like Google!

3. Your content isn’t geographically relevant to a local user

Remember how I said Google wants to serve the most relevant information to a user? That includes their geographic location. For many healthcare searches, Google makes it a priority to serve people local results for services near them.

Searches like “cardiologist,” “urgent care,” “pain clinic,” or “orthopedics” all prioritize websites from local organizations. That’s why it’s important that your website makes it clear which cities you serve. If your website isn’t ranking for a local keyword, it’s possible that Google doesn’t have a clear understanding of the local areas you serve.

Naturally incorporating city keywords within your page titles, headings, and body copy will help Google to better understand those regions you serve. This can be difficult if you’re a large organization spread across many cities, so strategically optimizing your service line content and building robust location pages to rank for these searches can often help you to remain competitive.

4. Your page has little or no authority

While relevance is an important factor for SEO, so is authority. Google wants to give users relevant and reliable information. This is especially important for healthcare.

Linking

The primary way your page gains authority is through links. The more links you have from quality, authoritative sites, the more Google will see your site as a reliable source of information. The more that you can do to build links to your site, whether through content marketing or outreach, the more weight your domain will carry in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, having a good internal cross-linking strategy within your site is just as important. It may be hard for deeper pages to gain authority if there are little or no external links to them. Internal links can pass authority from high-authority pages like your homepage or service line landing pages down to deeper sub-pages on your site. If a page isn’t ranking well in search, placing strategic internal links to your page can help improve the page’s authority quickly.

301 Redirects

One of the biggest issues I come across related to authority is the improper use (or lack of) redirects. If you change a page’s URL but don’t implement a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one, you’ve just destroyed your page’s authority. Google won’t correlate your old page with your new page, so you’re essentially starting over from scratch. By implementing a 301 redirect, you pass most of the previous page’s authority to your new page, thus preserving its hard-earned SEO. This is especially critical when you are going through a redesign and changing your site’s structure or domain.

Canonical URLs

Another issue that often hurts a page’s authority is duplicate content. If you have a page that is identical or nearly identical to another page, Google may choose not to rank it in search. This often happens with provider profiles that display across multiple domains.

If you have a preference as to which URL you want to rank, you can indicate this to Google with the rel=canonical element, which looks something like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://yoursite.com/your-preferred-URL” />

Placing this element on each of your duplicate pages with the preferred URL you want to rank will tell Google which URL you want to display in search results. Note that this will also prevent the other URLs from appearing in search.

5. The keyword you’re targeting is too difficult

SEO for healthcare is unique because the tactics necessary to rank for a keyword vary drastically. For searches for healthcare services, Google highly prioritizes relevance over authority, preferring to rank local websites. For searches related to healthcare conditions or treatments, Google highly prioritizes authority, preferring to rank nationally-recognized brands that have a long-standing reputation.

If the keyword you’re targeting falls into this second realm, you may be barking up the wrong proverbial tree, and your efforts may be better spent targeting another keyword.

When deciding whether to go after a keyword, consider the value gained by ranking for the keyword versus the amount of effort required. Is the time spent optimizing your site to rank going to pay off in the long run?

Estimating Keyword Value

When estimating a keyword’s value, think about the user’s intent and your marketing funnel. Searches for conditions like “heart disease” or “flu symptoms” tend to be informative searches falling at the top of the marketing funnel. These searches may not offer your organization as much return on investment as a search at the bottom of the funnel, such as “cardiologist” or “urgent care near me.”

One of the best ways to estimate a keyword’s value is by running a paid search campaign with your prospective keywords to identify those that are the highest converting. This allows you to go beyond search volume and understand which keywords will actually drive revenue.

Estimating Keyword Effort

When estimating the effort required to rank for a keyword, evaluate the sites currently ranking. Are they local sites, or is Google prioritizing high-authority sites with many inbound links? How are they targeting those keywords with their content? How many inbound links do they have?

Searches for “heart disease” return sites like Mayo Clinic, the CDC, and WebMD.

The Mayo Clinic has over 11.1 million inbound links to their domain. Even if this keyword has some value to your organization, the effort required to rank for this keyword is extremely high. You may be better off researching related, niche keywords that your local users search for, such as “heart disease treatment albuquerque nm.”

Get started and get ranking

While SEO can be complicated, it doesn’t have to be. If you follow the five guidelines above, your site should be in a good position to be competitive in search.

If you’re still having issues, or want help fixing the problems you uncover, Geonetric’s digital marketing team can perform an SEO assessment or jump in and start fixing the issues. Drop us a line and let’s get back those rankings you’ve worked so hard for!

And if you want to learn more, be sure to check our Ask the Experts: Get Answers to Your Top Healthcare SEO Questions webinar.

In April 2019, Amazon announced their voice search partnership with six healthcare brands to deliver Alexa voice assistant skills aimed to help patients and users with their healthcare needs. However, this wasn’t a shock to those who knew about the pilot program Amazon had initiated.

Take the Cedars-Sinai pilot in Los Angeles, CA. for starters. Cedars-Sinai placed Amazon Echo smart speakers in more than 100 patient rooms, and using a healthcare-specific voice assistant called Aiva, provided an easy way for patients to control their room and request help, from changing the TV channel to requesting medicine.

Now, with the HIPAA skills rollout, other organizations are taking advantage of the opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) in new ways. Today, Amazon Alexa’s healthcare partners include:

• Cigna Health: Cigna Health employees can manage their health improvement goals, increasing opportunities for wellness incentives.
• Express Scripts: Allows patients to ask for notifications on refills and mail-order prescriptions.
• Boston Children’s Hospital: Parents can provide their child’s care teams with updates on their child’s recuperation and get more information for post-operative appointments.
• Swedish Health Connect and Atrium Health: Allows consumers to find urgent care centers near them and schedule same-day appointments.
• Livongo: Members can ask for their latest blood sugar reading and trends, with personalized insights.

What does voice assistance mean for healthcare?

It’s hard to know exactly what the actual adoption will be for healthcare organizations or healthcare consumers. In terms of voice search, we know that user-focused, SEO-friendly content still reigns supreme whether a user relies on a smartphone, desktop keyboard, or voice search.

Experts see opportunity for voice assistants to help do some heavy lifting such as appointment scheduling, caregiver assistance, and helping free up nursing staff’s time by letting patients be more in control of their room and environment. As the trend shifts and grows, experts also see additional opportunity to deliver healthcare options to lower income homes and communities.

But despite the promises of success around voice assistance, privacy is still a chief concern, and rightly so. With news that Amazon employees are listening to thousands of conversations from smart speakers every day, it may take time for users to trust this innovation. According to Tech Crunch, “Consumers will need to understand how Amazon is securing their data before they feel comfortable using health and medical skills.”

Of course, this is all speculation. In the realm of technology, voice assistants are still in their infancy.

In any case, it’s good for healthcare marketers to keep an eye on AI trends and how they could work with their digital brand experience.

Chatbots in the healthcare marketplace

Another way healthcare is adapting to the pivoting needs of their growing digital audience is by employing chatbots. You’ve likely encountered them on other consumer websites you visit, from online banking to cable or phone companies.

And healthcare organizations are taking note for how this could assist healthcare consumers on the other side of the screen.

Adventist HealthCare, based in Gaithersburg, MD, offers a chatbot in the lower right corner of their website, asking, “Hi there! Welcome to Adventist HealthCare. Can I help answer something for you?”

With options like “find a doctor” and “urgent care online reservations” users can quickly accomplish tasks without navigating through the site. The bot can also help decipher text from visitors, directing them to the information that fits best with their needs, or recommending access to customer service teams.

Types and benefits of chatbots

Like voice assistants, chatbots are still young in the healthcare marketplace, but their growth is expected to climb radically in the next several years. According to Gartner, by 2020, nearly 50% of medium- to large-sized corporations will incorporate chatbots into their digital strategies. On the consumer side, nearly 85% of online interactions between consumers and brands will be non-human by that time, too.

If your organization is considering adding a chatbot, it’s important to keep it conversational, friendly, and valuable to the user. It’s also helpful to consider your internal resources to determine what type of chatbot you’d like to add, such as:

• Immediate connection – Makes content easier to find for users with only one click, similar to the Adventist HealthCare example.
• Deep search – A quick way to get an answer returned from a repository of information.
• Complex conversation – One that understands complex conversations from your users, providing conversion opportunities.
• Real-person-powered – A real-life customer-facing team member responds to users to help them get answers to questions or locations on the website.

This easy connection between consumers and brands has an opportunity to streamline your customer service, save money, and deliver a positive brand experience. They can also be available 24/7, so if a patient needs your help in the middle of the night, a deep search chatbot, for example, can direct them to information that could help.

Other AI-powered players

But voice assistants and chatbots aren’t the only forms of artificial intelligence, or AI, that are finding a home in healthcare. A few others are on the horizon as well, all with the goal of connecting patients and healthcare consumers with the tasks and information they need right now:

• Duplex – Google’s newest AI voice assistant ramped up the abilities to book appointments directly from search results – from restaurant reservations to hair salon visits – in 2018. Google continues exploring Duplex’s capabilities.
• Holly – an AI voice assistant by Nimblr that can help automate medical practices’ appointment cycles and reduce no-show patients – a problem costing the healthcare industry up to $150 billion per year. Nimblr’s Holly will integrate with Amazon’s Alexa, too, so Amazon Echo users can access this new skill.
• Smartphone chatbots — AI-led chatbots align user symptoms with potential conditions and recommendations for seeing a doctor. Samsung Health, for example, released this tool released in 2018 and comes built-in with all Samsung phones. It aligns closely with Google’s condition panel, which was released in 2015.

Stay ahead of the curve

Change comes in all forms when it comes to digital. As you evaluate what’s right for your organization, keep an eye on the healthcare industry and how major players and competitors are adding technology that influences the patient experience.

Don’t feel compelled to jump into these technologies without some careful consideration among your team and resources, but don’t be scared to test out new ideas either.

If you want to discuss what kind of new technology out there might help you connect and engage with patients and potential patients, contact Geonetric today.

Each time we produce our Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey results, one of the most popular topics is around staffing. As we’re putting the finishing touches on the eBook, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share a sneak peek at some of the trends in teams and staffing we’re uncovering.

Last year we reported on healthcare digital marketing’s “Top Jobs” – the top areas where healthcare systems were looking to add staff to support their digital marketing operations. This year, we looked at staffing a little more broadly, since staffing is only one indicator of where an organization is investing.

This year, we looked at the areas of growing investment for both staff and other investment including tools and outsourced support.

Top Growth Areas

The first observation, and no real surprise here, healthcare digital marketing teams are increasing their net investment in every area. The single top growth area by a wide margin is digital advertising, followed by digital strategy, video production, content marketing, and content development. Areas with the least planned investment growth are mobile app development, project management, and web hosting.

Those of you who follow our digital survey each year know we break respondents into self-reported segments: leaders (those ahead of competitors in certain areas), average (those keeping up with competitors), and laggards (those falling behind.) When looking at those areas of investment across these segments, patterns of growth are similar with a few notable exceptions:

• Leaders are more aggressively growing their capabilities for CRM and analytics
• Laggards are investing in core areas such as digital strategy and project management

The question that emerges is: do these investment priorities make sense given the other data we’ve collected? Or, from another perspective, how are healthcare organizations prioritizing their top areas for growth?

Investment vs. performance, plus outside perspective

To explore this further, we look at several other questions from the survey—providers’ self-reported performance in each of these areas along with the rankings of where healthcare is behind other industries from the perspective of providers themselves and of their vendor and agency partners.

Note: For this post, I’m using only the rank order of each of these items for comparison. For more detailed information, download the entire report when it’s available.

There are a number of areas where the data across these questions line up very cleanly.

Take general website management, for example. It’s one of the areas where healthcare organizations feel that they’re performing well (#2 on their list), it falls fairly low on the list of areas where healthcare is falling behind other industries (#14 for providers and #9 for vendors) and is a lower priority for new hiring (#16 overall).

But not all of the investment priorities for the coming year line up in that way. Let’s take a closer look to see what’s going on for those areas.

Areas that are booming or lagging

To start, there are two functions that are booming: digital advertising and content development.

Digital advertising is a space where healthcare organizations rank their performance highly relative to competitors (#3), don’t see themselves falling behind other industries (#12), and even their vendor partners see them holding up fairly well (#8). Despite all of this, digital advertising is the top area of increased hiring and investment for the coming year!

Content development is a similar scenario. Despite already being competitive, it is high on the list of new investment priorities.

The bottom line is that health systems are doubling down in digital advertising and content development because these are areas that are giving them great lift right now – and probably for slightly different reasons.

Organic reach is shrinking across the board – from social media to search engines. It’s an increasingly a pay-to-play world and healthcare organizations are using paid advertising more than ever.

Great content is the tide that lift all ships. When you have great content and a process that allows you to develop more great content over time, all of the other tactics that you’re implementing with digital become that much easier and that much more effective.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have some lagging spaces: user experience (UX), development, analytics, business listing management, and mobile app development. Even with the perceived shortcomings in these areas, health systems are just less likely to be able to prioritize growing investment in these areas amongst all of the other areas requiring new resources.

Where should you invest

At the end of the day, your growth priorities are mostly about where your organization is today and where you’re in need of expanding capabilities. The insights here aren’t telling you where to invest but they do give us an indication of where your competitors will likely be getting better in the coming year and where they’re seeing outsized value in the investments that they’re making today.

Prepare to see healthcare organizations growing digital advertising, investing in strategy, upping their game in the content realm – particularly in terms of video – and pushing ahead in CRM although still not as fast as their agency partners think that they should be.

Within that, however, we see our booming spaces. Healthcare marketers are doing well in online advertising and content. There’s already significant investment here in both staff and dollar terms.  And, despite that, your competitors are doubling down in these areas. Not investing because they’re behind but because they’re seeing so much value for the investments that they’re making. It’s hard to go wrong growing your capabilities in these areas.

And that’s one strategy.

But there’s another way to go. Look at the lagging spaces. These areas seem ripe for investment, but respondents aren’t looking to fill those gaps for whatever reason. Maybe the payoff is less direct?  Maybe they think that mediocre is good enough? Maybe they’re still searching for worthwhile use cases for mobile apps?

Or maybe they’re missing the opportunity? Investing in areas like analytics or business listings could just be your opportunity to leapfrog the competition or maintain your lead.

It’s our hope that this information along with many other insights in our upcoming webinar and our survey report can help you invest strategically rather than in response to the latest trend or the squeaky wheel in your organization.

Our digital marketing team – compiled of experts in optimization, healthcare, and data – works with health systems of all sizes, in all markets, and wants to share the no-nonsense best practices they’ve tested and perfected. That’s why they’re assembling for a first-ever SEO Roundtable focused on answering your most pressing questions.

They’ll dive into top trends and constant challenges, including:

• What you should do about voice search
• How to gauge and report your SEO success
• Why business listings should be imperative to your overall SEO strategy
• The top SEO issues preventing your healthcare system from ranking
• Tricks to making keyword research really pay off
• What in the SEO-landscape is overrated and what truly deserves your attention

You’ll hear unique viewpoints from experts with different backgrounds, who are all are focused on bringing you actionable guidance that’s been proven successful for healthcare organizations like yours.

Our team is ready to cut through the fluff and provide real, valuable insight to help you compete like never before.

Imagine this scenario:

Your heart and vascular center just got an incredible makeover, bringing your organization into the upper echelon of heart care providers in the area. With the renovation, you’re also planning new events for heart patients and families, and you’re excited to help your community with screenings on the new equipment.

But now it’s time to turn your attention toward the web. And that’s where landing pages come in.

What is a landing page?

Landing pages are generally standalone webpages with a single focus, intended for a specific audience and often tied to a marketing or advertising campaign. In a healthcare organization, this might be a campaign for heart screenings in Heart Health Awareness Month, or maybe it’s your mobile mammogram unit.

Landing pages should funnel your users to a single action, such as scheduling an appointment, finding a doctor, or attending an event. Sharing your landing page with vanity URLs can be a helpful way to attract traffic from social, referrals, traditional advertising, and more.

Why do landing pages matter?

Landing pages help consumers move along in their journey, which usually appears in four stages of a specific funnel:

• Attract – Connecting the user or patient with content they need based on their search or interest
• Engage – Delivering value through content and helping your user or patient answer important questions
• Convert – The user or patient moving to the next logical step: Scheduling an appointment, attending a class, etc.
• Retain – The patient returns for future visits, and shares their positive experience with family and friends

Considering nearly 80% of internet users – around 93 million Americans – search for health-related topics online, it’s a valuable opportunity you don’t want to miss. And a well-designed landing page can help organizations like yours get in front of them and answer their queries and needs and put them on a path to conversion.

Before you start: Set a goal

Before you launch a new landing page, meet with stakeholders and your team to determine a goal you want to set.

By setting a goal, you’ll build a stronger strategy for the landing page copy and design. And SMART goals are a great place to start.

What are SMART goals? This stand for:

• Specific – Tie your goal to actual numbers.
• Measurable – Something you can monitor with tools, like Google Analytics.
• Attainable – An achievable goal that’s not too big to chew.
• Relevant – Aligns with your overhead organizational goals.
• Timely – Has a specific time period to measure, such as month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, etc.

SMART goals can find their way into many pieces of your marketing strategy, including content marketing and editorial calendar planning.

For purposes of this exercise, let’s set the following goal for your heart and vascular center:

With the heart and vascular center campaign page, our goal is to get 200 event registrations in the next three months for our heart classes and schedule at least 50 heart screenings. We’ll do this by tracking form submissions for the event registration and the “schedule a screening” call-to-action. We’ll monitor our progress in Google Analytics, using conversion tracking through Google Goals.

Once you’ve shared your goal and agreed on it internally, it’s time to start strategizing the landing page itself.

Five tips for building a landing page that converts

Ready, set, go! It’s time to build a landing page. But where do you start? And what elements make a successful campaign landing page?

1. Put calls-to-action high up on the page

You should have a clear goal in mind for your landing page and that goal should be attached to a clickable call-to-action. Instead of burying the call-to-action in body copy, or at the bottom of the page, keep it high on the page and eye-catching. When you build a call-to-action, don’t forget to:

• Use text that speaks to the user
• Use short, action-oriented button text (i.e. reserve your spot)
• Use brand-friendly, contrasting colors that attract attention and stand out
• Keep the CTA fairly large, so it attracts attention on all screen sizes

2. Add videos and media to keep people engaged, especially on mobile

Video can be a great way to track conversion and interest of your users. Unsure if that’s true? Check out these impressive stats about video play:

• Over half of video content is viewed on mobile
• YouTube boasts over a billion users – nearly a third of total internet users
• 87% of online marketers rely on video content

They’re also highly shareable, and make great assets to keep available on your social media profiles, where you should also be sharing your landing page when it’s ready to launch. In fact, 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.

Whether it’s a tour of your new heart and vascular facility or an interview with a leading cardiologist and recent patient, videos are a great way to engage your audience.

3. Enable clickable phone numbers and e-mail addresses

The last thing a user wants to do on a mobile phone is to remember a phone number or email. Instead, make sure your phone numbers or emails on your landing page are clickable and open either the mobile phone’s native phone dialer or the user’s preferred email provider.

4. Make your content about the patient experience

Your doctors’ expertise, your incredible new technology, and your beautiful new waiting room and surgical suites are impressive, of course. But how do those things impact the experience and health outcomes of your future patients? That’s the story you want to share, and it’s the story they want to read.

Landing pages are no place to write a term paper about how great you are. Instead, focus on what information the consumer or patient really needs to know. In the case of your heart and vascular center, they want to know “Why should I choose you?”

Subheads, bullets, and short, easy-to-digest paragraphs are still the name of the game when it comes to landing page content, so don’t leave your writing for the web best practices at home.

5. Weave your keywords in the right places

Of course, as you’re writing content for your landing page, be sure that you’re using keywords your audience relies on to find you (and your competitors).

“Cardiovascular surgeons” may be the language you use, but if your target audience uses “heart doctor” in search, you’ll want to answer that call.

Keywords find nice homes woven contextually into your body copy, but also:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headings and subheadings
• Calls-to-action
• Alt text on images or videos

Before you start writing, conduct keyword research to determine what high-value keywords to incorporate into your landing page content.

Launch, monitor, iterate

As your campaign page leaves the proverbial nest, keep an eye on how it’s doing. Track not only the analytics you established for your SMART goals, but consider adding heat-map or click tracking to see how users are engaging with it on different devices.

If you’re noticing features of your landing page aren’t being used, consider a quick A/B test to send users to different versions of the landing page. Does the CTA perform better on one version than the other? Maybe the video belongs lower on the page, rather than the top? A/B testing divides the traffic in half, allowing you to track the success (and challenges) of each, which can inform future iterations and improvements.

If you’re ready to take some new organizational initiatives to the web with a landing page, but you can’t or don’t want to do it alone, Geonetric can help. Contact us today to get in touch with our friendly experts who’ll help you research keywords, strategize conversion opportunities, write groundbreaking copy, track your goals, and design stellar landing pages that convert.

Want ways to be more strategic when it comes to digital marketing? Wish you knew what your competitors are spending on digital? Looking for ammunition to help sell a website redesign or the need for more resources? Geonetric’s 2019 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey has all the answers you need – and more.

Watch this webinar and get an insider look at the state of digital marketing in healthcare. (And download the actual survey for even more data!) These results are like nothing else in industry – with more than 260 healthcare marketers and agency partners sharing their unique perspectives, it’s the largest, most popular survey available. It’s also the only survey that splits respondents into leader, average, and laggard organizations, so you can easily compare your team’s size, budget, redesign cycles, and digital efforts to your peers and competitors. Because at the end of the day, what you really want to know if you are ahead or behind – and how you can keep that leading position or start to catch up.

You’ll learn:

• How healthcare organizations are structuring teams and divvying budget up between traditional and digital
• What goals healthcare marketing teams are working towards and how effective they are at tracking success
• If hot trends, like personalization, are really delivering value
• What digital tactics are most likely to be outsourced and what’s staying in-house
• How your website’s functionality compares to industry averages
• What tactics you should be paying attention to for 2019 and beyond