Well-informed, user-centric digital marketing helps your audiences feel comfortable and confident in choosing your organization for their care, employment, or charitable giving. It improves goal completion, engagement, and ultimately, your health system’s bottom line.

So before you launch a service-line promotional campaign, redesign your website, or start a blog, consider information such as:

• Who your users are: Get relevant demographic information like age, gender, location, education level, disabilities, socioeconomic status, etc. Don’t forget to think about people close to those you’re trying to capture, like spouses or caregivers.
• Who influences them: Who are the biggest decision makers in your users’ lives? Should you target your marketing efforts to the loved ones of potential patients in addition to — or even instead of — the patients themselves?
• What they want: Your users’ content needs to override what your organization thinks is important. What’s motivating your users? Is that pressure positive or negative? What are their end goals — not just the task they want to complete on the website, but what they want to accomplish as a result of that task, like improving their health or community?
• What they’re afraid of: Healthcare almost always involves uncertainty. What specific concerns do audiences have about your topic? What or who is fueling those anxieties?
• What their obstacles are: Are the roadblocks tangible, like language barriers, disabilities, or lack of time? Or less tangible, like community taboo around a particular medical service? Who or what can help users overcome this obstacle?
• How they act: What tools do users prefer to engage with your web content? How much time do they spend with it? What are they searching for?

Empathy can help you start thinking of answers to some of these questions. But answering most of them requires some combination of market research, user research, and user testing. And since data is only as good as the process used to get it, you must choose the right sources and tools for your particular needs.

How to Get Information

You’ll understand your users best when you use both of these types of research:

• Quantitative – Numerical, measurable data
• Qualitative – Information that’s not numerical, like opinions and emotions

You’ll find no shortage of resources to help you find both quantitative and qualitative information at every stage of a digital marketing initiative—from brainstorming topics to refining navigation labels to tracking clicks. Your marketing agency or web partner can guide you to the right tools for your specific project, goals, and budget, and help you interpret the results.

Research & Testing Methods

Here are some tools Geonetric uses to help healthcare systems improve consumer engagement on the web:

Recruiting Participants

Whenever you’re testing a website or campaign content with real people, try to recruit the types of participants your marketing initiative is targeting. (That means not just your colleagues down the hall!)

To gather initial interest, try placing an ad, posting on social media, or using an existing email list. After getting a pool of volunteers, narrow it down to a manageable number that will provide the depth and breadth of results you want. You might filter according to demographic information, or do a phone screening to gauge things like familiarity with your organization and website. Consider also attending a Patient & Family Advisory Council meeting, if you have such a group, to explain your project and ask members to participate. Whatever methods you choose, reward participants for their time by offering to put their name in a drawing for a gift card or another prize.

Industry Research

In addition to custom user testing and research, you can also make your digital marketing more effective with industry research into broad user trends. Nielsen Norman Group shares results and insights from their wealth of usability and user experience studies on topics like eye tracking, intranets, mobile design, navigation, young users, and much more. Consider NRC Health for healthcare industry research and surveys (available for a fee). And for basic demographic information in your area, check the U.S. Census Bureau and University of North Carolina’s Health Literacy Data Map, which shows literacy levels by county across the country.

Patient Perspectives

If your marketing initiative focuses on patients, you have a few options for gathering additional qualitative data. Your organization may have support groups for people with certain medical conditions. Ask to meet with the organizers and/or members to learn more about their needs, concerns, and goals to discover how your digital marketing efforts can better help people in their situation. These members could form the basis of a focus group — a small-group discussion you moderate and record. Invite a colleague to take notes so you can focus on facilitating the conversation. If you’d prefer to discuss topics in greater detail with each person, consider individual (consumer) interviews instead. This approach can especially help you better understand the patient journey.

If focus groups or interviews aren’t an option, explore online communities for the patients and families you’re targeting. Patients Like Me has forums for many medical conditions, where you can read the questions, frustrations, and successes members have throughout their treatment journey. Many nationwide organizations, like the American and American Cancer Society, also have online communities open to anyone who creates an account. And Facebook has a wealth of groups and pages related to medical conditions and treatments — virtual hangouts where people express thoughts even more openly than they may in person.

If you’d like to ask questions, first check whether a particular online community has rules about posts from journalists, marketers, or people other than patients and families. And ask with sensitivity, explaining how responses could ultimately help other people with a certain medical condition.

Consolidate & Visualize Your Information

Once you have a foundational understanding of your users as a whole, consider using what you’ve learned to develop personas. These fictional, research-based representations of your audience can help you visualize and empathize with users and better understand the customer journey. When making your online marketing plan, you may find it easier to keep in mind a few well-developed personas than a mass of data. Use them to motivate and guide content strategy, writing, and design.

Examples of User Research Success

Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is one organization that saw firsthand the impact of user research and testing. When the organization learned web users were highly interested in information about urgent care, Mercy made the content more prominent. That simple change tripled visits to urgent care webpages, including the eArrival online check-in service.

Cone Health in Greensboro, NC, also saw impressive results from user behavior analysis and testing. After updating its brand promise, purpose, and vision, the organization reimagined its website to reflect its new priorities — and better engage users. Click tracking, analytics review, and user testing led to better-performing content, including a high-priority “Compare Your Care Options” page whose views increased 112%.

The Norwegian Cancer Society also adjusted their website content to prioritize what users identified as their top tasks. Rather than devoting banner ads and homepage space to users’ low-priority task of donating, the society promoted giving opportunities in more-strategic places — like content about research and funding needs. As a result, the organization recorded a 70% increase in one-time donations and 88% increase in monthly donors registered.

Want to see results like these for your organization? Contact us for help getting started.

Consider Your Audience

Like the rest of your website, this section should be focused on the needs of your website visitors. What do they want to know? Why have they come to this page? What do they want to learn and what are they going to do after they find out? But first and foremost, who are they?

Luckily, Google Analytics and members of your organization can provide you with useful insight as to who those audiences may be and what they’re looking for. Your audience could include:

• Potential patients wanting to know more about your organization before coming to you
• Existing patients interested in learning more about you
• People who want to work with you, including physicians and other job seekers who want to learn why you’re the right place for them
• The media, who may be looking for more information about your organization and the background that made you who you are today
• Politicians, community leaders, and engaged citizens who want to learn more about what you provide your community
• Donors who could be deciding whether to give to your organization
• Companies that are new to the area researching relocation/expansion options and considering their employees’ healthcare needs

As you move forward working on this page or section, keep these audiences top of mind and make sure that you’re putting what they want first.

Before You Write, Plan

Although this may seem like a no-brainer, planning your page is an important first step — especially for pages like this that could have many different audiences.

When you’re writing about your organization, it’s easy to throw everything and the kitchen sink on the page. After all, it’s a catch-all, right? Wrong! Make sure that you plan for what you actually need on the page so you don’t go overboard.

Common Content on an About Us Page

Although it’s easy to put a lot of information on your About Us page, successful pages tend to highlight this type of content:

• Mission, vision, and values
• Overview of your system — bed size, revenue, and employees, as well as a very high-level summary of what types of services and locations you offer (hospitals, clinics, home healthcare, etc.)
• Awards and recognitions
• Organizational history/timeline
• Executive/Leadership team and bios
• Community benefits information
• Quality and safety data

Include enough of your story so that your visitor feels like they get to know who you are, what you’re about, and what your brand personality is. And be specific to what your audience is looking for. Consider outlining your page before you write. Plan each section you need, making sure to connect the content with at least one of the audiences you already identified. But make sure you don’t include more than what your research shows a visitor will want to read.

The variety of content combined with the many different audiences that could be visiting highlights the importance of cross-linking on an About Us page. Make sure you weave copy and links to take job seekers, patients, the community, and media to other areas of the website, including careers, services, location profiles, and news and media information.

About Us Page Content Best Practices

When you’re ready to review and revise or rewrite your About Us page, keep these best practices in mind.

• Keep the 5 Ws in Mind: All journalists are taught to answer the 5 Ws — who, what, where, when, why (and sometimes how). Follow the same advice on your About Us page. You’re telling a story — your story! But every good story needs an editor. Keep the narrative focused on what your website visitors want (and sometimes need) to know, not what you want to say.
• Communicate Your ‘Light Bulb’ Moment: While you’re writing, consider what point you’re trying to get across. What’s the one thing that made your organization what it is today? Then, consider why that benefits your patients, job seekers, or other readers. That is a pivotal part of your story, so make sure you build on it.
• Show Off Your Brand’s Personality: Your About Us page is meant to communicate who you are, so your personality should come through, too! Instead of approaching this page from a dry, journalistic voice, infuse the page with your brand’s personality. Whether it’s caring and approachable or intelligent and authoritative, make sure it comes across on this page.
• Consider Mapping Out Your History, But Stay High-level: Does your organization have an interesting or unusual history? Does your history speak to your mission today? Consider incorporating a high-level history on this page to tell that story. Just keep in mind that whatever you say has to follow all the earlier best practices, so make sure it’s meaningful to your website visitor’s interests and needs.
• Give Your Readers the Option to Follow Up: Whether it’s a phone number to call or a contact form (or maybe both), make it easy to ask questions or learn more. Keep in mind that all those audiences mentioned earlier will have different next steps. Try to find a call to action that makes sense for the page and meets the needs of the primary audience’s goals and needs. Then, rely on your reader’s ability to use the navigation elements to find what they’re looking for otherwise.

Start Writing

If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out these organizations’ About Us pages.

• Cone Health Medical Group
• Nash UNC Health Care
• ProHealth Care

Now that you’re armed with best practices and motivation, it’s time to get writing! Not sure where to start? Reach out to Geonetric’s content experts for help in crafting your story.

Why Data Visualization Matters

Humans process images 60,000 times faster than they process text, which makes sense as 65 percent of people claim to be visual learners. In a field like healthcare digital marketing, which relies heavily on numbers and data, how can you ensure your data isn’t going in one eye and out the other? Only 10-20 percent of written data is remembered. Data visualization allows us to tap into that visual data transfer which results in roughly 65 percent of visual information being remembered.

When you need to prove success, get buy-in, or take action it’s imperative that your data is easy to digest. Often times your audience does not have the same analytical mindset that you have, and presenting an excel spreadsheet full of numbers and formulas might not effectively represent your intended message. Data visualization helps enable you to tell your story and prevent that message from being lost in translation.

Above we can see two representations of the same data. While we can extrapolate the connection between the two search terms in the table, it’s very difficult to understand why this data is being presented without a thorough explanation. However, a simple chart allows us to immediately understand the correlation between people searching for a solar eclipse and searching for reasons why their eyes hurt. Without the visual approach to this data, it would have been very hard, if not impossible, to understand the data being presented.

SEO & Data Visualization

As a healthcare SEO (search engine optimizer) you work with a lot of different tools to accomplish a lot of different initiatives. You use analytics to understand your website and how your users are interacting with you online. You use tools to track organic rankings, to run specific campaign initiatives, and to run tests on your site. With all of these different sources of information, it’s very easy to get bogged down in the data and lose sight of your goals. Data visualization is the answer.

Creating reports or dashboards for your SEO efforts can allow you to comprehensively connect the dots and understand what’s working and what’s not. Beyond the simple yes or no answers, it allows you to use your data to drive decisions and shift your priorities. Creating visualizations based on UTM parameters, organic keyword forecasting, A/B tests on specific service line pages, or your conversion funnels allows you to take a micro or macro approach and confidently optimize your efforts.

One of the places where many healthcare marketers struggle is analyzing, understanding, and responding to the competitive landscape for a specific service. Creating visual representations of this data allows you to easily identify gaps where you can focus your initiatives. Understanding where each competitor ranks organically for high-quality keywords, knowing where they spend their marketing dollars, and identifying what content they’re having success with is critical. Instead of lines and lines of text and numbers, creating visually appealing and effective charts and tables can save time and resources on finding and implementing solutions. Having a more complete picture of the competitive landscape can be quickly dissected and iterated upon.

Choosing the Right Data

When determining which data you should include, you should ask yourself some simple questions:

• Why are you doing this?
• What story are you trying to tell?
• Who is your audience?

The ‘why’ behind your data is one of the most important aspects of selecting data. Selecting data is not synonymous with cherry-picking data. Maybe you’re simply trying to understand your users. Perhaps you’re trying to get some buy-in from stakeholders, or simply analyzing the results of a specific initiative. The why behind your data should be aligned with your organization goals, and should already have a defined measurement plan for success. Understanding the why should lend itself to an understanding of which data points are important.

Once you’ve determined the ‘why’, you should also quickly make the connection to the ‘what’. What story are you trying to tell? Like all data, there should be a point of sharing it. You might be comparing results of your marketing initiatives, determining desire paths on your site in relation to the user paths you’ve provided, or attempting to understand how different experiences interact and align. Similar to the ‘why’, the ‘what’ behind your data needs to be established before you can effectively communicate said data to your audience. A good practice is to ask yourself “So what?” when you’re analyzing your data. Being critical of the data you’re preparing allows you to ensure that your audience can take action on what you give them.

The ‘why’ and the ‘what’ should provide you with the most valuable data you need to utilize to create your visuals. However, the final piece in determining what goes where is understanding who will be viewing this data. Members of your team likely do not have the same needs as an internal stakeholder. Your agency partner(s) likely have a more solid grasp on the state of your website and can likely react to much more detail-oriented data, while a physician for a certain service line might require the highlights.

Asking yourself these three questions will enable you to craft visual data representations that speak to your audience in a way that will produce results. Beyond being actionable, this data will resonate more with your audience and be more memorable, making future conversations even easier. Using a tool like Google Data Studio (GDS) will also allow you to dynamically refresh, reuse, and repurpose these visualizations which will save even more time in the long run.

Choosing the Right Visualization

Once you’ve determined what data you need to present, you need to determine the best visualization to showcase that data. There are two general types of visualizations: tables and charts. When looking at your data here are some quick ways to identify the most effective visualization:

Use tables when:

• You have large amounts of data
• You need the ability to drill down in your data
• The figures must be precise
• Specific datasets require attention

Use charts when:

• You have fewer datasets
• Your data needs to be simplified
• Your data is quantitative
• You’re trying to showcase trends

When you think of tables you probably think of a simple excel spreadsheet, maybe with some filters layered over the columns. However, circling back to GDS, you can add additional elements to your tables to still make them visually appealing and easy to digest and take action upon.

As you can see in this table we have some demographic information, broken down by medium, analyzing how those specific segments of users interact with our site and how they contribute to our revenue. Although this is a table with a large number of data points included, it’s still easy to understand; females age 35-44 drive a large portion of our revenue. We can also extrapolate that the more time people spend on our site the more likely they are to convert into “buyers”. Tables can be a very effective data visualization medium if your ‘why’ and ‘what’ are strategic and intentional. Alternatively, charts are an instrumental tool in showcasing smaller datasets and establishing, reporting, and taking action upon trends. Layering different chart types on top of each other allow us to compare and contrast our story without having to highlight specific data points.

In the example below, we look at how organic searches translate to sessions and how that impacts our revenue. This data is broken down by days of the week, which is very useful when determining to schedule for our marketing initiatives.

While this chart is telling a very clear, compelling story, we don’t need to emphasize the exact figures. We simply want to understand trends that we can then turn into data-driven decisions moving forward. When we do need to dive deeper into the data from a more qualitative perspective, we have the ability to transition this data seamlessly into a table. This is why understanding your audience is so critical; getting buy-in from your stakeholder(s) might require showing this type of trend that supports your tactics and strategies, while the next steps might require your team to look at the data a little closer. Effective data visualization allows for fluidity.

Key Takeaways

We use data every day to make informed decisions on where to spend marketing dollars, how to staff our teams, and getting stakeholders to understand the value and reasoning for our efforts. You have likely heard someone say, “What does this mean?” or, “What am I supposed to do with this information?” and you’re left scratching your head because, to you, those answers are clear and obvious. Our audience doesn’t always speak our language, so our data needs to be translated into a more universal tongue: visualization.

Data visualization provides insights that are more digestible, customized to meet specific informational needs of your audience, and reduce the likelihood of individuals misunderstanding or misinterpreting the data you’re sharing. By presenting your data in a visual manner it streamlines your communication and your optimization or strategic initiatives. Beyond increasing effectiveness, data visualization makes receiving buy-in much easier. However, data visualization can be overdone. It’s important that your story doesn’t get lost in the presentation, so ensure your visuals don’t distract from the data you’re trying to showcase. Establish your goals, determine the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ before you start, this will keep your visuals effective and reduce the likelihood of unnecessary complexity. Select the data that matters, sometimes we add fluffy vanity metrics to help ease the conversation, if you effectively present your data in a visually appealing way, that becomes unneeded.

Remember that people process images exponentially faster than text, which is why you’ll likely revisit the written portions of this blog. Your data doesn’t have to be a point of contention, it can be the solution. If you need help translating your data into visually appealing stories or setting up a dashboard for your campaigns in Google Data Studio, contact us. We can help you set up a template with an experienced digital marketing expert for free. You can also check out this popular webinar to find more information on data visualization for healthcare.

That’s why our content team — filled with experts in journalism, content strategy, content marketing, and healthcare — is here to help by hosting a popular Ask the Experts webinar. They’ll use their deep experience helping health systems of all sizes develop intuitive information architectures, build engaging content marketing hubs, and create content that converts.

They’ll take on the tough questions, including how to:

• Develop and use personas and patient journeys effectively in your writing
• Get the information you need out of stakeholder interviews
• Move from silos of content to a system approach
• Use people-first language in your writing
• Incorporate keyword research in your content
• Be thoughtful about your community’s health literacy levels

Your Careers Content as a Recruitment Tool

Are there certain positions your HR team is always trying to fill? Professions that are in high demand, or a certain role that requires skilled candidates with specific training? There are shortages for certain professionals, including doctors and nurses, and your organization is competing today more than ever for qualified people.

Your website is often the front door for recruiting. Take a close look at your current website content about the career opportunities available at your organization. Is it as effective as it could be? Does it speak directly to your ideal candidates, answer their common questions, highlight your differentiators as an employer, and specify who you’re looking for? Optimizing the careers section of your website will help your organization stand out in a competitive landscape—so the right prospective hires become the newest members of your team.

What Appeals to Job Seekers?

Think back to your job search for your current position. What was most important to you? Chances are, it was a combination of factors like:

• Growing as a professional in your field
• Competitive compensation and great benefits
• Being part of something bigger than yourself

You wanted to know as much as possible about what the organization offered in exchange for your hard work.
When job seekers visit your organization’s website, they want to find out what it’ll be like to work at your hospital or health care system. Describe how they’ll benefit in the short- and long-term, and be transparent and accurate. Explain the value of your benefits, perks, and culture to prospective employees in your website content. Consider listing and describing:

• Benefits such as health insurance, retirement planning, dental and vision insurance, life insurance, etc.
• Salary information
• Paid time off
• Professional development opportunities, such as continuing education classes, on-site trainings, nurse residency programs, and tuition reimbursement
• Employee assistance programs
• Work-life balance options including working from home and flexible hours
• Wellness programs and discounted or free gym memberships
• Any other amenities or perks, such as on-site child care services or performance bonuses
• Work culture
• What it’s like to live in the area, including information about recreation opportunities, the climate, and links to local schools and childcare services

If possible, survey your current staff (especially recent hires) about what they like most, and use their answers to inform your content. If some benefits are position-specific, specify that in the job listing rather than including it in your general careers content.

Be Specific

Content that makes an impression on job seekers provides as much detail as possible. For example, instead of simply listing “Employee wellness program,” say “Your physical, mental, and emotional well-being is important to us. That’s why we offer a range of employee wellness services, including free fitness classes and health screenings, to help you protect and improve your health.” This helps users get a sense of your culture and values as an employer.

Tell Your Story

The mission of your healthcare organization can be a powerful recruiting tool. The best employees are passionate about what they do, rather than simply punching a clock. Millennials, especially, are interested in choosing a job that matches their personal belief and value system.

Your organization makes a difference in the lives of patients and their loved ones every day. Inspire your applicants to come aboard and take pride in their work by weaving your mission, vision, and values into your copy, and linking to relevant content elsewhere on your site where applicable.

Hard-to-Fill Position Recruitment

Consider creating dedicated landing pages within your careers recruitment content that speak directly to your ideal candidate in hard-to-fill fields. For instance, if you want to attract doctors and nurses, write two pages that pitch your organization specifically to those respective audiences.

Adventist HealthCare, a Maryland-based health system, worked with Geonetric to restructure the Careers section of their website, developing new content to target and reach candidates with specialized skills, including:

• Allied health professionals, non-physician and non-nurse professionals such as social workers and certified technicians
• Home health providers
• Mental health professionals
• Nurses
• Non-clinical staff, including administrative, management, information technology, and services roles

Learn more about Adventist HealthCare’s recent redesign and how Geonetric helped the organization meet their goals.

Talk to staff who are already in those roles at your organization about what they like best about working there and what attracted them in the first place. Then, weave those features into your page copy. For example:

• “Join a team of nurses who are passionate about improving health care and work closely with doctors who respect their expertise and skills.”
• “Apply your skills as a radiologist using the latest technology in a well-equipped clinic.”

Conduct keyword research for your area and look into what professionals in the role you’re focusing on are most attracted to, then write content that addresses how your organization can meet those needs. For example:

• “Grow your practice and give your patients access to our wide-range of services when you join Benefit Health as an affiliated physician.”

Qualifying Candidates

Successful recruiting is about bringing people on board who not only fit your current culture, but help push your organization forward into the future.

Help prospects understand if they’ll be a good fit at your organization by explaining the characteristics and personality traits they need to thrive. What do your best current employees share? Are they leaders, team-oriented, compassionate, and flexible? Do they feel fulfilled by giving back to your community? Are they energized by learning and applying the latest, evidence-based practices to improve patient safety? Make it clear who you’re looking for, and the right candidates will take note and get excited to join a work culture where they’re likely to succeed.

Tools for Success

Help your candidates shine by helping them understand what’s expected of them throughout the hiring process.

In your website content or a blog post you promote with a PPC ad campaign or social media ads, include tips on how they can make their resume and cover letter as strong as possible, and give them tips on how to make the best impression during interviews. If something is important to your hiring staff, it’s important for your candidates to know, too.

Writing Compelling Copy

Just like all the other sections of your website, your careers section should follow our best practices for web writing. Write content that’s:

• Clear and concise
• User-focused
• Informative and answers common user concerns. For example, if you receive a lot of questions about the hiring process, explain in step-by-step instructions what applicants should expect, and who they may contact at any point in the process if they need help.
• Makes it easy for the reader to take action. Each page should include a compelling call-to-action that’s relevant to that page—for example, “search available jobs, “apply now,” or “contact us.”

Testimonials

Job seekers trust and seek out the opinions and perspectives of current and past employees. Consider enriching your careers content with quotes from your staff, or, if your organization has positive anonymous reviews on a site like Glassdoor, set up an employer account to feature and respond to employee reviews, and link to the best reviews from your website.

Supercharge Your Careers Content

If increasing applicant volume, finding qualified new hires, and improving employee retention are important to your organization, get assistance from the content strategists and writers at Geonetric.

Boost your service line performance and accomplish goals like increasing brand awareness and patient volume when you dig into your competitors’ websites, service line by service line.

Take an Iterative Approach

Good healthcare marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why we recommend analyzing your competition from a service line perspective, as well as an overall organizational perspective. But which department or service line would most benefit from competitive analysis? Start with the service lines that are a primary focus for your organization as part of your strategic plan. If there are too many to choose from, or your organization hasn’t identified priorities, ask yourself the following:

• Which service lines generate the most revenue?
• Are there service lines with strong or increasing competition in your area?
• Is there a service line that’s grown in the last few years or has future opportunities to grow? Or a service line that seems to be losing business?

Once you’ve determined the service line(s) you think would most benefit from strategic competitive analysis, you’ll enter into a research and discovery phase.

Research & Discovery Step 1: Who Are Your Competitors?

Your departments usually have different competitors than your organization at-large. When conducting competitive analyses, research the healthcare organizations in your town, county, state, or region—and remember that patients may be motivated to travel farther for certain types of specialized care. Compile a list of the organizations you intend to analyze who present current or potential threats to your organization’s services.

Research & Discovery Step 2: Interview Stakeholders

Your departmental leaders have nuanced knowledge about the services you offer, how your patients and community view your organization, and the competitive landscape in your area. Ask them:

• When patients don’t see you for care, where do they go? Confirm the list you created of competitors in your region from Step 1. In context of your service line, what do they do well, and what are their weaknesses? How do your different competitors potentially threaten your business?
• What’s different and unique about your care? How do the services you offer or your team’s approach to care differ?
• What’s the one thing you want your patients to tell others about your team’s care? Do patients and their families see you as the community hospital offering one-on-one attention, the academic research center with cutting-edge technology, or the one-stop-shop for primary and specialty care? Think about your strengths and how they support your brand.
• Who is your typical patient? Describe their demographics, preferences, and interests, and what you know they like most about your services.

Research & Discovery Step 3: Understand Your Target Audience

Knowing your audience—who they are, what they care about, their common questions—is critical to writing helpful, engaging service line content and setting yourself apart from your competitors.

Gather what you know about the target audience(s) of your service line, and consider if they have specific preferences for their care. If possible, interview current or past patients of the department, or review their patient feedback.

Ask what’s most important to them when it comes to researching and choosing care, what attracted them to your organization, and what they most liked or disliked about their experience.

Analyzing Your Competitors’ Online Presence

After you’ve gotten your arms around your stakeholder feedback and patients’ needs, it’s time to analyze your competitors’ websites. Research and record answers to the following questions. (Don’t forget to analyze your own organization, too!)

• Is the content easy to read and understand? Or does it have complex sentences, medical jargon, and undefined acronyms? What grade reading level is it written at?
• Is the content personalized to the user, focusing on their needs and how they benefit from getting care? Or is the content written in an organization-focused way?
• Is the content sensitive and empathetic to the patient’s experience, or is it judgmental and overly negative?
• It the section intuitively easy to navigate? Is the content organized in a way that follows the typical patient journey?
• Is the section mobile-friendly? In 2019, 51% of time spent online is now spent on a mobile device.
• Does each page have accurate and user-friendly metadata? Are relevant keywords used naturally in the copy to support SEO?
• Are there clear, relevant calls-to-action on every page? Or is the next step unclear?
• Is the website accessible? Does the site offer an equal experience to people who have a disability, or does it not comply with federal guidelines?

Beyond your competitor’s website, what other strategies are your competitors using to reach your market?

Once you’ve pinpointed your competitors’ website weaknesses and strengths, compare them to yours. Give your users the better online experience, and they’ll reward you with increased online traffic and conversions. If your service line is lacking in any of the above categories, get help from Geonetric to improve your website and get results.

Identify Your Differentiators

Weave what makes your organization the best choice for care into your copy where relevant. That means:

• Answering common patient concerns/questions in a way that positions your organization as the best choice for care
• Highlighting any unique services, treatments, or programs, or advanced technology and equipment
• Explaining your staff’s approach to care, noting any special staff certifications, educational attainments, or roles
• Listing service line department and staff awards and accreditations, explaining them in context of how patients benefit

For example, if you’re focusing on your maternity service line and you know your target audience is made up of women with diverse preferences for their birth experience, use language that makes it clear your staff respect the patient’s preferences and birth plan, and that you offer a wide range of amenities and services to suit different personal choices.

Spin Your “Weaknesses” into Strengths

Put a positive spin on the differences between you and your competitors. For example, if you’re a smaller community hospital competing with a behemoth health system, your content can highlight the personalized nature of your care, describing how your friendly, skilled staff treat patients and their loved ones like family. Stress how much easier it is to get same-day care once you’re an established patient. As long as it still accurately describes what it’s like to get care at your organization, there’s a way to top your competitors through strategic language.

Increase Market Share

Read our other helpful tips for conducting digital competitive analyses, or contact Geonetric today if you’re ready to increase your market share by enhancing the performance of your service line content. We offer a wide range of options to meet the unique needs of hospitals and health systems across the U.S.

Healthcare organizations must be investing in optimization efforts, but with so many areas to focus on including technical, on-page, and external search engine optimization (SEO), it’s hard to know which tactics are the most valuable.

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how Dan Small, Director of Digital Strategy, from Hartford HealthCare (Hartford, CT) invested in research and their site’s technical foundation to own organic search for priority service lines and how Megan Yezak, Marketing Manager at MidMichigan Health (Midland, MI) transformed their site traffic to a more clinically focused audience by taking a strategic approach to business listings.

You’ll learn how to:

• Review your current efforts and uncover where you need to focus your optimization efforts – on-page, externally, or in technical enhancements
• Take actionable steps to “own” organic search for your service lines, locations, and providers
• Make search optimization a priority in your organization – from fixing technical issues to maintaining business listings to establishing governance systems and processes to make those investments pay off in the long term.

Today’s healthcare marketers demand more in a CMS. It needs to not only house hundreds of pages of content about services, doctors, and providers, but it also needs to offer governance tools to keep content up-to-date and provide an appropriate engine for hosting content marketing and marketing assets.

And managing these throngs of marketing opportunities becomes a bit more complex as you start to weigh all the CMS options in the marketplace. If your current platform is giving you headaches and draining your team’s human and financial resources, it might be time to see what’s on the market.

But as the guardian of your brand’s marketing, what should you look for when it comes to content strategy inside a CMS?

Here are some areas where you can start to bring content strategy considerations into the mix once you start comparing CMS options.

1. Site navigation

Site navigation is essential to any user experience (UX), including healthcare, and managing public-facing navigation is a big task.

An ideal CMS should make it easy to create, update, reorder, or restructure any navigation element to properly maintain the hierarchical browsing experience of your site, from global navigation to the footer.

Healthcare websites often comes with complex structure, many of which require deep parent/child relationship pages to exist. But without the ability to properly build these pages or move or restructure navigation as needed, you’re doing your UX a disservice.

In the same breath, the CMS should let you easily update domain information and set proper redirects as necessary. At the end of the day, the question of “where stuff lives” should be easy to control by you and your team without jumping through hoops to get there.

2. Taxonomy and dynamic content

What is taxonomy? Taxonomy is a branch of science concerned with classifying things, often in groups. In healthcare, that’s often things like services, doctors, locations, and more.

Taxonomy that’s built into the CMS can do a lot of the legwork for you by eliminating planning and implementing your own classifications. But you should also want a CMS that gives you the freedom and flexibility to create additional taxonomy configurations if you need them, such as those used for content marketing hubs.

When taxonomy is executed well, it delivers one-stop experiences for potential patients, displaying related information throughout your site without too much manual work by your team.

3. File storage and management

Whether you’re building an intranet or a public-facing website, having up-to-date files — such as images and PDFs — available for patients and web visitors to download with ease is a must. Extra points go to the CMS that allows you to easily overwrite and version control your files so that you’re using the most current version available.

If you need to protect your files, check for public and secure file options so you can control their release.

Most importantly, a single asset management “home” in the CMS means you can easily link to files when and where it’s appropriate rather than having to upload them uniquely to each page where it’s referenced, saving you time if you need to update the file in the future. Publish once, link everywhere!

4. Content strategy & author experience

Content is a big word. It can include everything from writing and placing copy on a page to building the design layout of the page with callouts and images to structured content and taxonomy that allows admins to “write once, publish everywhere” across the site.

While you may be solely responsible for content strategy and authoring, some organizations have multiple team members with admin access to edit and publish pages or content. Choosing a CMS that streamlines the access but controls the quality is a worthwhile consideration.

When reviewing the authorship experience, check if the CMS allows:

• Ability to easily edit content and see live or preview changes
• Ease of uploading and linking to or embedding files, including images or videos
• Access to version control, including republishing previous versions, or noting version changes to share with other administrators
• Control to adjust pages and templates at will, including placing related and dynamic content on the page, adding callouts or feature content, and more
• Ability to adjust taxonomy to dynamically display related content across the site

When it comes to structured content, see what the platforms you’re reviewing have to offer. In healthcare, some prebuilt structured content, like location directories and provider profiles, can lift a heavy load off your shoulders and give you a leg up with a fully integrated system and manageable governance going forward.

It’s possible you and your team would prefer a blank slate — even a CMS that isn’t built specifically for healthcare. This puts you and your team in the development driver’s seat, giving you full control over the taxonomy and structured experience you build. It might take more strategic planning and implementation considerations, too, so you’ll need to think about the kind of time you have to devote to it.

If you’re allowed a lot of freedom in the content experience, see if your CMS allows you to build example templates in the back-end so your team can reference them as they continue to build and edit pages across the site. Voice, tone, and style guidelines can also help keep your team rowing in the same direction when it comes to your content experience.

5. Search and findability

How a page is searched, both via search engines and on-site search, is vital to UX.

Keyword research that identifies common terms and phrases used by your audience or communities should drive how you write copy and control search components. Seek a CMS that allows you the ability to:

• Craft unique, page-specific page titles
• Develop unique, appropriate meta descriptions to influence search engine users
• Apply keywords to pages of content or taxonomy to engage the on-site search experience
• Insert proper redirects when pages are moved throughout your site’s structure

If your current CMS is automatically configuring this information for you, it could be doing more damage than you realize. Having the power to control your search engine optimization experience is an important factor in any website manager’s role.

6. Governance tools

Your team members have various skills, roles, and responsibilities. Those roles may have a wide reach or a narrow, specific purpose. But keeping your team working together means knowing who’s capable of what and when — also known as governance.

Choose a CMS that has pre-structured governance workflows and permissions to keep your site healthy. As you’re CMS shopping, check for:

• Permission settings, such as the ability for a page to be “saved” but not “published” until a specific person or role approves
• Workflow status, which can send pages to various people in the organization for final approval and publishing rights
• Version control and the ability to republish or revisit a previous version
• Notes and open communication spaces built-in so team members can communicate with one another within the CMS

Document your team’s roles, responsibilities, and capabilities, too, as these lay an important foundation and shared understanding among your team’s operation.

BONUS: The right CMS partner

You need a partner who understands your needs and can bring experience and expertise alongside your new system.

Maybe you have a team of dozens supporting your site but need strategic guidance to stay ahead, or you’re a team of one and need assistance with the day-to-day operation of your website. No matter the case, it’s important to understand both the abilities and availability of your internal resources and find the right partner to either complement those skills or fill any gaps.

Whether you’re choosing open-source solutions like Drupal or WordPress, or proprietary, healthcare-specific software solution like VitalSite®, it’s essential that you have a team who can support you.

But what’s the difference?

Proprietary software teams likely live within a company, but as owners of the software they take the task of ensuring compliance with PCI and HIPAA off your plate. They’re also responsible for software upgrades and bug fixes or patches.

Open source gives your team an array of freedom and control on the final product, but often leaves it in your hands to ensure compliance. You’ll also be responsible for finding reliable plug-ins that are trustworthy, secure, and updated regularly to deliver expected functionality.

No matter what CMS you choose, you’ll want to have access to experts who can provide troubleshooting and upgrades while keeping your CMS running efficiently and delivering the best possible web experience across a host of devices.

And don’t be afraid to ask potential partners about skills beyond CMS expertise, too. Digital marketing skills — including content development, paid advertising services, design assistance, and more — can be helpful additions to even a robust marketing team.

Let us help

Contact the Geonetric team today if you need helping selecting the right platform or want to learn about the CMS platforms we support.

All important to the overall digital well-being of your organization – and all require different skills. It’s no surprise that large health systems now boast teams of 20 full-time equivalents (FTEs), according to our recent 2019 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends survey.

But for every large organization there are multiple smaller health systems, medical groups, and community hospitals doing the same functions with a lean team. And when it comes to digital, your website approach and tools can be the difference between competing with the big dogs or getting buried under piles of requests. Attend this webinar and learn what you should be looking for in your next CMS to give your team the foundation you need to compete.

In this webinar you will learn how to:

• Understand the skills and roles needed for digital to be successful in a small organization
• Identify signs your current CMS isn’t supporting your team or your digital goals
• Evaluate the different approaches to web content management and what they require of your team
• Understand healthcare-specific needs of a CMS to keep your organization in compliance with HIPAA and PCI

Online listing management can seem like a daunting task. Many healthcare organizations have hundreds or thousands of location and provider listings that require ongoing maintenance. Inconsistent or inaccurate data can misdirect patients and consumers, which can hurt your reputation and your revenue.

But, intimidating though it may seem, online listing management is critical today.

In 2019, Google reported that 63% of mobile searches were no-click searches. This means that Google answered the search query themselves without users clicking through to a website. Through various featured callouts, structured snippets, knowledge panels, and most often, Google My Business (GMB) listings, Google can deliver the information that searchers are looking for without ever sending them to a website. Assuming that 63% of people will not be clicking through to your website, do your business listings give users what they need?

Consumers have come to expect accuracy with everything we find online. Patients looking for care are no different. Ensuring that all of your locations and providers are claimed, verified, and accurate in GMB is a significant first step to addressing this. However, it should not be the last step. It is essential to understand that managing your online listings is not a one-and-done task. Ongoing optimization and management are just as crucial to ensuring your information is accurate for patients, both existing and potential, who are searching for care.

So if you’re looking to invest more in business listing management, here are seven tips to optimize and help your listing rank in Google:

1. Work with internal stakeholders

If you are in charge of creating and maintaining your business listings, reach out to the key people at the different locations or within your organization. Let them know the importance of having accurate data in your listings. Request that they let you know when a provider leaves or if information changes for their location. Let them know who to contact if they receive comments or questions based on inaccurate information. They are the ones who hear the patient feedback most: “Google says you open at 8:00 a.m.” or “I couldn’t find the building,” etc. Encourage them to pass that feedback onto you so you can resolve the misinformation online. Or, consider creating an internal ticket system to request changes to establish an efficient flow of information.

2. Choose the right primary category

Google is going to show listings that are most relevant to the user’s search query. Although you can add multiple categories to your listing, the primary category should best represent your location or provider as it is the only one that users can see on your listing. Look at your listing insights to see what terms users are searching for when they come across your listing. For example, if you use the primary category of “Medical Center” when “Urgent Care” would be a better fit for that location, you may be missing out on potential traffic or rankings. If your category isn’t an option in the GMB dashboard, you can reach out to GMB Support and request it be added.

3. Make sure your website is the source of truth

One of the top foundational ranking factors for Google listings is that there is synergy between the name, address, and phone number (NAP) and the corresponding GMB listing. If necessary, create a web governance checklist so that when people make changes to a name, address, phone number, or hours on the website, they also make them on the Google listing or notify someone of the changes.

4. Drive the user to the right page

Imagine this scenario: a user conducts a Google search for “urgent care near me.” Your listing shows up first in the local 3-pack, the prominent map listing in search results that presents users the three businesses that Google considers most relevant to their query and location. Great! The user sees that the location is nearby and clicks the website link to learn more about provided services. If this links to a service line page that doesn’t include location information, the user can become frustrated. It is good to remember that every search is really a question and every click should be an answer to that question. The information on your website must match the listing so that it can most accurately answer the searchers’ question. If you have a listing for urgent care, there should be information for urgent care locations. If you have a listing for a cardiology department and you link to a cardiology service line page, you should ensure that page has location information in sync with the corresponding business listing.

5. Add photos and videos

According to Google’s own data, “Businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions to their location from users on Google and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t have photos.” It is essential to upload your own, professional photos to each listing so that your images have a better chance of displaying over images that Google users can upload. If you have videos of your providers or virtual tours of a location, consider adding them to the appropriate listings. Photos and videos encourage engagement with your listing, and that is a key ranking factor on Google.

6. Check for updates regularly
Take the time, preferably on a weekly basis, to check your listings for updates in the GMB dashboard. These updates could be based on user-suggested changes or Google’s crawl of your site. Often times, these updates can be a change to the business hours or website URL. If this task is left to Google’s automation, you may find incorrect, inconsistent, or outdated information on your listings. This leads to frustration and poor user experience but can be avoided with a regular maintenance task.

7. Use UTM Parameters

Also known as Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes, UTM parameters are snippets of code that are appended to URLs to track different sources of traffic to your website from various advertising and marketing channels and tactics. While having UTM parameters won’t affect your local listing ranking, they will allow you to get a better understanding of what listings are driving the most traffic to your site and how users are engaging with your site from there. You should use UTM parameters for both your website and appointment URLs, if applicable. There are several tools to help you create your UTM tracking code, such as the Google Campaign URL Builder. You can also use an Excel spreadsheet to build and keep track of all your UTMs. Make sure you’re using a consistent naming convention for all of your online listings, so your data aggregates as accurately as possible in Google Analytics.

Take control of your data

Maintaining an active and ongoing role in your online listings management is important. While the first initial time investments can be significant, ongoing maintenance may just take a little bit of time every week or every month. That continuous pruning and care can make all the difference in preventing issues from coming up and snowballing into more significant problems. Plus, it helps ensure you are meeting the needs of the 63% of people who inevitably don’t visit your site.

If you need help getting the ball rolling or locating the most substantial pain points, we can help you. We work with healthcare organizations around the country to manage their listings and can use our insight to help you optimize your listings. We can perform a business listings audit and help create a plan of action for addressing any problem areas that we find as well as create an ongoing maintenance strategy.

Remember, Google and other listings providers rely on automatic algorithms and user input to provide information. Do not leave your information up to that process. Take control of your data and maintain it for ongoing digital health.