More and more often, patients are acting as consumers — people who freely choose from a wide array of healthcare options. Especially younger healthcare consumers, who may make care decisions differently than their other generations who tend to be attracted to more traditional choices.

New players in the market are poised to take advantage of consumers who are open to choosing retail-only alternatives, rather than options that are connected to larger health systems. Major retailers like CVS, Target, and Walgreens have all entered the space for a good reason – consumers are looking for quick, convenient options when it comes to their care.

Healthcare organizations are embracing retail strategies – particularly around urgent care – to compete with those retail-only offerings and to attract younger patients and others consumers who are seeking care that is more convenient.

What does this mean for you as a healthcare marketer? It’s important to understand how retail players are changing the care landscape, how millennials are changing healthcare buying behavior, and why the way you market urgent care might be the answer to both issues.

The Rise of Retail Healthcare

Convenience isn’t the only reason Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are set to disrupt care delivery. Consumers already know and have a connection to these brands. As these retail companies enter the healthcare industry, they’re going to take advantage of the relationships that consumers already have with their brands. Retailers with name recognition and loyal consumers can hit the ground running when offering new services, even when they are venturing into an entire new industry.

Retailers, who know better than anyone how consumers make purchasing decisions, are more likely to embrace transparency when it comes to pricing. The consumer can prepare for a purchase, adjusting their budget to make room for something a little more expensive. Or they can shop around to make sure they’re getting the best value.

Millennials on the Edge of Change

Millennials may be the most likely group to embrace nontraditional healthcare providers. According to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation study, 45 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds have no primary care provider. A 2015 study also shows that Millennials prefer retail or acute care options – 34 percent prefer retail options and 25 percent about acute care clinics. Several factors contribute to those numbers, from convenience of care to a sensitivity to the cost of care. Regardless of the reason, it’s clear that the gap in primary care coverage is creating a shift and that healthcare providers need to address this group.

The Connection & Where You Can Come In

What is the connection between the millennial split from primary care and the rise of stand-alone retail healthcare options? It’s all about convenience and easy options with clear, affordable pricing. Effective positioning of your urgent care as a retail healthcare option will help you compete in this space.

You probably already know that those coming into your urgent care locations aren’t always established patients. They might be experiencing cold or flu symptoms and want care for that, but they may not realize if their symptoms are part of a recurring health problem. Your organization can leverage their relationship with urgent care as an opportunity to encourage them to choose a long-term primary care provider with your system.

Urgent care provides the convenience of quick access to care with the straightforward cost of an office copay. If your website shows wait times or offers online check-in, urgent care visits get even easier.

By making an effort to promote your different access points to care – especially around urgent care – you can show patients that they don’t need to visit a busy Target or Walgreens. They can receive care that is just as quick and easy to access through you, a trusted healthcare provider. You also have the unique ability to run lab tests and make referrals to specialists within your system for follow-up care, as appropriate.

Meeting Your Patients Where They Need You

The key to standing out is improving your ability to be efficient and detailed in your time with patients while providing them with superior care. Where do you start? Your current website is a great place to begin. Millennials and others looking for convenient care will often turn to the web to evaluate care options, directions, and hours. Make sure you’re providing the information they need.

Here are a few best practices you can do now with your website content to compete with retail options:

• Use language that is patient focused and easy to understand. After all, that’s what retailers excel at – make sure you do, too.
• Focus on the benefits of choosing urgent care over retail healthcare, such as:
  • Connection to broader health services at your organization
  • Expertise of your health system
  • Ability to care for more-pressing illnesses and injuries
  • Access to more lab and imaging services
• Conduct keyword research to learn what words people are using to search for urgent care services and incorporate the terms naturally into your content.
• Make it clear how quick your access to care is, either through displaying actual wait times or by explaining your average wait times.
• Use your call to action to let your potential patients know if you offer time reservations, even for walk-in clinics.
• Make sure to build out and optimize urgent care and walk-in clinic location profiles for your users’ needs. Be sure to investigate how your content management system handles adding location schema to your content. For Geonetric clients using VitalSite, you will automatically have the benefit of appropriate schema for location information. This will immediately help you compete for those “urgent care near me” searchers.
• Claim your Google My Business listings and make sure to build them out and connect them to your website.
• Pay attention to shifts in how Google is doing business and consider how pay-per-click advertising fits in your online advertising budget as Google answers more queries directly on the results page.

Seem like a daunting task? Geonetric helps healthcare systems and hospitals stay on top of digital trends, develop strategies, and measure results. We can help you strategize, develop content, and create a campaign around your urgent care offerings. Contact us today!

The 9th edition of Geonetric’s Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey is an indispensable resource. It will give you an inside view based on data from over 300 organizations — more than 260 hospitals and health systems and more than 40 agency partners — who responded to the 2019 edition of the survey, the largest ever.

Geonetric’s annual collaboration with eHealthcare Strategy & Trends delivers the most comprehensive look at the digital evolution of healthcare organizations available.

New this year, Geonetric incorporated feedback from multi-year survey takers who confirmed that this data is a “must have” planning tool for all healthcare digital marketers. And, unlike other survey results on the market, our distinct benchmarking method lets you see how leading organizations plan, budget, and execute differently from their counterparts as well as gain interesting perspectives from your agency partners.

When teams at Geonetric start content marketing projects with our clients, we always begin by asking the biggest question of all: “What are your marketing goals?” This could include organizational goals, which should drive your marketing-specific goals. And both should inspire your content marketing brainstorming.

Your goals might be to:

• Attract new site visitors
• Keep current patients healthy and happy in your community
• Increase the volume of new appointments and online scheduling
• Drive walk-in foot traffic to immediate care clinics
• Shine a light on your advanced technology to drive appointments
• Encourage sharing of your articles on social media
• …or all of the above

These are common answers we hear and they’re likely similar to the goals you and your team have at your organization.

Typically, organizational goals funnel down into marketing goals. Those marketing goals drive the different campaigns for the year, based on where the team sees the greatest opportunity to grow volume or leverage margins. (Check out this blog post for more information on aligning digital and organization goals.)

Most healthcare marketing teams have target service lines identified for the year that they plan to support with integrated marketing campaigns. If your team knows—even at a high level—what services will be highlighted throughout the year, there are opportunities to make those efforts go farther with content marketing planning.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach focused on creating exclusive, valuable content and delivering it consistently.

• Exclusive – Available only on your website and not republished from another source
• Consistent – Published and shared regularly and in conjunction with marketing goals
• Valuable – Timely, consumable, credible, audience-focused, and actionable content that’s optimized for search and connects readers to your brand

When done right, content marketing engages and converts your target audiences while boosting your search engine rankings and fueling social media engagement.

Aligning Goals to Content Marketing

Just as you approve only billboard and radio spots that are tied to bigger goals, you make your content marketing efforts more effective by tying them thoughtfully to a campaign, and ultimately, your organization’s goals. That’s where your editorial calendar comes in.

By aligning organizational goals throughout the upcoming quarter or year to your editorial calendar, you and your team can create assets and collateral that drive interest from consumers, support your patients’ journeys and assist conversion goals.

Have Your Campaign Schedule in-hand While You Plan

As an example, let’s pretend your organization is starting a mobile mammogram program through your hospital as a way to encourage breast cancer screenings. Your C-level team has a goal to grow cancer service line volume by a certain percent, which coordinates with the effort to launch the mobile mammogram unit, which will hit the streets of your community on October 1.

As a content marketing team, you’ve decided focusing on breast cancer screenings is a strategic choice, based on a segment of your personas, demographics, and competition. You’ve also planned TV and radio ads, as well as features in local magazines and newspapers, to talk about your mobile mammogram program.

So how could your content marketing team and assets support the effort? Here are some ideas:

• Blog posts about breast cancer in your community – statistics, survivors, and the importance of screenings
• Patient stories about their breast exam or cancer treatment experience at your hospital – especially around how a mammogram lead to early detection and a fast treatment
• Video tours of the mobile mammogram unit
• Podcasts and ask-the-expert interviews with radiologic technologists and breast specialists in your hospital who can explain how mammograms work, and how patients can prepare for their first exam
• Infographics about breast health and breast cancer in the United States, or myths around breast cancer screenings that you can correct to inspire faith in mammograms

Plan with Enough Advance for Resource Allocation

Of course, as you brainstorm these ideas, you’ll want at least a month or two notice to get your resources in order and have the appropriate team members assigned to the work.

You’ll also want to plan for social sharing these assets on various media, such as Facebook and Twitter, and through various channels, such as email marketing and internal communications.

Example Healthcare Marketing Editorial Calendar

If we were to put the mobile mammogram assets into an editorial calendar for planning, here’s what a patient story and blog post might look like:

• Expected publish date: Third week of October
• Author: J. Smith
• Topic: How a Mammogram at 40 Saved My Life
• Summary: A patient story and blog post about our mammogram services and follow-up breast cancer services
• Stakeholders: Dr. Johnson, breast center mammography; Ms. Adams, patient
• Call-to-action: Schedule your mammogram today or find our mobile mammogram unit near you
• Sharing channels: Facebook, Twitter

What about if we had other formats of content besides blogs and patient stories? Let’s try a video tour of our mammogram unit:

• Expected publish date: One week prior to mobile mammogram unit opening
• Author: A. Anderson
• Topic: Video Tour – Inside ABC Health System’s Mobile Mammogram Unit
• Summary: A short (3-5 minute) tour of our mobile mammogram unit, with an interview with Dr. Smith
• Stakeholders: Dr. Smith, director of mobile mammogram unit
• Call-to-action: Visit our mobile mammogram unit near you
• Sharing channels: Facebook, Twitter, news release (for local news)

But don’t stop there! Infographics, podcasts, advice columns, and listicles are all great ways to share more stories around this ever-important topic. And appropriately planning your resources and team around developing this content gives you an editorial calendar plan you can achieve.

Fill in Calendar Gaps with Health Awareness

Throughout the year, awareness events and months surround the healthcare community. From Women’s Wear Red Day in February (for heart health) to Healthy Aging Month in September, there are a myriad of options from which to choose.

As you align your editorial calendar with specific campaigns, gaps may appear in between campaigns. Awareness months are a way to fill in the gaps.

Use Data to Drive Potential Marketing Topics

As a tip, avoid copying your health library’s content and avoid saying what’s already been said. Your content marketing should answer questions and queries your community’s health consumers actually have. You can find this research through tools such as:

• Google Trends
• Keyword Planner
• Quora
• Search engine auto-complete or “also asked”
• Friends, family members, and visitors to the hospital

This real-person data can help inspire new ideas and approaches to common topics. But what makes gives your content marketing the best angle is the resources right in front of you: Your doctors, providers, staff, patients, and volunteers. Interview them and get a sense of what types of questions real patients are asking and create content that aligns!

For more tips and tricks to improve your content marketing efforts, check out this webinar: 5 Ways to Kickstart Your Content Marketing.

Times Have Changed

In the past, search engines worked almost exclusively like this: You’d type in a query and get a list of webpages or other online content that might have what you’re looking for. Then you’d choose which link to click on and be taken to the most relevant content.

Google was an intermediary serving two audiences. Content creators allowed the search giant to scrape their content in exchange for (mostly) free traffic to that content. Consumers came to Google for its ability to point them to the best possible sources of information to answer their questions in exchange for the occasional click on an advertisement — which was always clearly marked as paid placement and was relevant to their search.

Now, Google is moving from being the card catalog for the internet to trying to be the encyclopedia. No longer acting as an intermediary – a guide pointing the way to information – the search engine is increasingly serving up content directly on the results page. For example, rather than just linking to a page listing family practitioners, the search engine itself lists some available, nearby providers. Or instead of providing a link to a webpage with the address for a doctor’s office, Google takes the searcher to its own Google Maps application where it can continue to show paid advertising options.

As Google serves up more information directly on its SERPs, so-called “no-click searches,” — where searchers never leave Google network of websites — are steadily increasing. No-click searches have been relatively consistent on desktop computers where they’ve hovered at about 34 percent of desktop searches for the past few years, but they’ve grown dramatically on mobile devices with a whopping 61 percent of mobile searches in 2018, up from just less than 42 percent in 2016, according to data from software companies Jumpshot and SparkToro.

Many segments aren’t feeling this pain yet as the growth in no-click searches has been offset by growth in mobile searching volume, but certain markets where Google has been aggressive in implementing its new techniques, such as restaurants, video, weather, and airline flights, have seen significant drops in traffic from Google.

Why Does This Matter?

This change is great for Google, which keeps more traffic on its sites, controls the end-to-end experience for more and more of its users, and gets more advertising revenue. This change is also ok with most consumers who can be indifferent to where they get their questions answered, have great trust in Google, and often have a distinct preference for Google’s services. But what does it mean for you as a marketer and creator of healthcare content?

That depends on the searcher’s need and type of query. Many no-click healthcare-related searches are simple and transactional — searches for a provider’s address or phone number, for example. If that one bit of information is truly all the user needs, and the information they find on the SERP is accurate, they’ll still be able to engage with your organization.

Another growing category of no-click searches today is answers to generic healthcare questions. Google will display a featured snippet with the answer to the question right at the top of the SERP. This is also what is read aloud when answering voice-search requests powered by Google’s search engine (the ultimate no-click search platform!).

So even though your webpages may lose some traffic to the SERP, users will still convert — at least for today — and that conversion, though not a pageview, is what ultimately impacts your organization’s bottom line.

But in other cases, users may miss valuable information that appears only on your webpage, not in whatever snapshot of content Google chooses to display on the SERP. Ideally, you’ve strategically created webpages that not only answers users’ immediate questions but also leads them to other relevant content that guides them to take action. A featured snippet on a SERP just doesn’t provide the same level of value as your well-built webpages.

In addition, as Google continues down this path, we could see more and more transactions bypassing health-system websites, giving Google unprecedented power to influence where consumers receive care.

What Should You Do?

These changes certainly don’t signal an end to SEO. Far from it! But it’s time for us to rebalance the role of SEO within our traffic-generation efforts. It’s only one tool in a complex arena of strategies. More of those strategies need to be employed, and it’s more important than ever that the SEO work you do is focused on the right areas for maximum impact.

So how can you help make sure more users see the full range of your organization’s valuable information? Consider these approaches.

Drive Users Directly to Your Site

Harness the potential of your marketing efforts that bypass search engines. For audiences you already have a relationship with, use email marketing and social media to send users directly to your website. And promote online content through offline channels, including broadcast media, print publications, and community outreach.

Play Google’s Game

It’s more important than ever to create, claim, and manage content about your organization on Google’s platforms, especially Google My Business, Google Maps, and YouTube. Add photos and videos, and respond to reviews and questions that users submit. You can also use Google Posts — a form of microblogging — to promote news and events such as community screenings and health fairs.

Just remember that anyone can suggest edits to certain elements of knowledge panels, so you’ll want to monitor them and correct misinformation.

It’s OK to Pay

Facebook has been a few years ahead of Google in tightening organic reach. Like Google, Facebook has been under considerable pressure to increase revenues by moving more businesses to pay for access to its users. The result is that boosted Facebook posts have become the most commonly used paid online advertising technique used in healthcare.

Your organization isn’t expecting free TV ads or billboards. Going forward, it should expect to pay for online visibility but also benefit from the advantages of visibility, trackability, and greater dollar-for-dollar impact online compared to traditional marketing channels.

Optimize Your Website Content

Although no-click searches are increasing, the raw number of overall Google searches is steadily rising. And your website likely continues to get most of its traffic from organic search, meaning you still need to optimize your webpages for search engines using tried-and-true tactics. This includes writing informative, compelling content that rewards users for coming to your website and keeps them there.

In addition, healthcare organizations need to reevaluate what — and who — your’re optimizing for. Too many organizations look inside to decide what to prioritize. Going forward, more organizations need to look at consumers’ healthcare journeys to determine when they can be reached and examine search behaviors to find where it’s most important that they compete, such as for localized searches (e.g., “Family practice doctors near me.”)

Takeaway

You’ll put your organization in a strong position for success if you give Google what it wants, but also continue to invest in diverse digital marketing efforts. With a robust array of skills and marketing initiatives, your team will be ready to top the competition, no matter how technology and user behavior change. Want to talk more about ways to compete today? Let’s chat.

Listen to this executive discussion featuring Patrick Kane, Senior Vice President, Marketing Communications & Business Development, Cape Cod Healthcare (Hyannis, MA), and Matt McKinney, Assistant Director of Communications, Cone Health (Greensboro, NC). These healthcare marketing leaders shared how they set the stage for successful redesigns by focusing on strategy before, during, and after the project. You’ll also learn what features and functionality are must-haves to improve user experience and why they focused on locations and facilities in new ways. From learning how to ensure a redesign can support a bigger-picture strategic vision to testing user experience at every opportunity, you’ll walk away knowing how to ensure your next redesign meets the needs of both your organization and your users.

Viewers will learn how to:

• Invest in pre-redesign strategy, from usability testing to user behavior data to in-depth content and location strategy, and use results to guide redesign strategy
• Identify essential features and functionality for the next iteration of your site
• Leverage real-world advice from fellow healthcare executives who recently completed redesigns — including tips that made all the difference and things they wished they’d known going in
• Get inspiration from designs that are putting the patient first and seeing impressive results

An editorial calendar serves as your documented content strategy: Where you’re going, where you’ve been, and what lies ahead. It shares who owns each asset, whether a blog article, infographic, or a video. It outlines the purpose of the content and the intended audience action.
When used right, an editorial calendar can keep your team working harmoniously toward your annual organizational and marketing goals.

But, according to a 2018 content marketing in healthcare study, only one-third of healthcare organizations surveyed said they had a documented content marketing strategy.

If you’re sick of treading water, spinning your wheels, or any other colloquialism that sums up not moving forward, check out these six quick tricks to start putting together your team’s editorial calendar.

1. Build an editorial calendar MVP

In sports, MVP means “most valuable player,” but in the world of software, MVP stands for “minimum viable product,” or a baseline starting point.

An editorial calendar can be filled with detailed information. If you’re building your first editorial calendar, you’ll want to begin with the essentials, such as:

• Anticipated publish date – Approximate date or month you’re hoping to publish the piece.
• Author/owner – Who’ll own or write the content/asset you’re planning and publishing?
• Topic/title – Identify the asset topic or title so you know what information you already have and what you need.
• A brief, one-sentence summary about the content – What’s the purpose of the content? How would you quickly summarize the piece to a colleague? This summary will help if the work needs to move to another team member.
• Resources or stakeholders – Not all resources are at your fingertips. If you need to reach out to doctors or subject matter experts to weigh in on a topic, jot the role or person’s name down.
• Intended call-to-action – Every piece of content you create needs a follow-up action. Brainstorm what this action should be for each asset. Ideally, you’ll tie it to your organizational goals.
• Sharing channels – Which social media profiles will be the most effective for the content you’re creating?

HubSpot recommends building an editorial calendar no further than three months out. This timing allows your team to meet regularly and plan ahead, but also leaves space to adjust if a new, hot topic lands on your plate with little notice.

In some cases, you may choose to strategize article ideas further out than three months. Use the following tips:

2. Gather your stakeholder allies

Nothing helps move content along more than the buy-in from internal stakeholders. Whether you’re seeking approval for content ideas or face time with subject matter experts, it’s good to reach out with your editorial calendar in hand.

While the editorial calendar should highlight your marketing team goals, it should also show ties to organization-wide campaigns and plans. It should give palpable visibility to how your team can help build success for the organization’s bottom line.

As you talk to outside colleagues, you’ll also find myriad article topics and ideas. Your doctors know what’s troubling your patients the most. Hospital volunteers likely have face time with hospital visitors. These and other hardworking people at your hospital can deliver great content ideas to enhance your calendar.

3. Organize around your marketing campaigns

You’re likely also to find yourself in the office of your chief marketing officer (CMO) who could give you suggestions and ideas to tie your efforts together.

These campaigns or brand-wide goals are a great way to plan content work into your editorial calendar.

Is your organization looking to get your mobile mammogram into the community this fall? Get a post ready for Breast Cancer Awareness in October. Maybe you’re hoping to connect with schools and businesses about summer safety. Start ideation in the spring with your team to tie your content marketing to these events to bolster registration and interest.

4. Branch out to health awareness events

If your organization’s campaigns are running thin, there’s always something going on in the world of healthcare outside your walls.

There are always great health-focused campaigns — like Go Red for Women Day, Autism Awareness Month, and National Bike Safety Week — that drive interest and searches from people outside your organization.

And because these awareness events are planned far in advance, they’re a great way to add some depth to your editorial calendar.

5. Get a handle on locally popular keywords

Content marketing works best when you include words and phrases your audience uses.

Keyword research can tell you about how patients in your area, for example, search for terms around “cancer.” What questions do they have? What concerns are driving their searches? How can you plan for content that meets their needs?

Even “related searches” or “people also searched for” boxes on search engines can provide insight into what topics users are searching. This information can drive ideation for content marketing, but also inspire a solid plan for your editorial calendar.

6. Strategize SMART goals to help you measure, iterate, and grow

Once you start publishing content with your editorial calendar’s guidance, it’s time to put measurements in place.

SMART goals are a great place to start. SMART stands for:

• Specific – Tie your goals to actual numbers. Maybe it’s a 10% increase in monthly visitors or a 20% increase in appointment requests.
• Measurable – Make sure your specific targets are measurable, too. Use tools like Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics for insight into your specific goals and their successes.
• Attainable – Always dream big for your marketing plans, but make sure your goals are attainable. Anything beyond your attainable goal is confetti!
• Relevant – Your marketing goals should be relevant to your organizational goals. Avoid “noise” from outside your team for tracking success. Make sure your goals are relevant to what you’re delivering.
• Timely – Take everything above and measure these goals over a period of time. This could be month to month, year over year, or even quarterly.

As you establish SMART goals, review them with your team and take them to stakeholders or C-level team members who may want to keep up with what your editorial calendar looks like. This also gives transparency to your project and allows you the flexibility to adjust if the goals you set don’t deliver.

Keep an Eye on Your Team and Brand Goals

Once you’re implementing and staying true to your editorial calendar and you’re keeping an eye on your SMART goals, outline opportunities for improvements or changes as time allows.

Want to learn more? Check out our webinar on 5 Ways to Kickstart Your Content Marketing.

Content marketing is an engaging, reliable way to answer everyday health questions, from how to treat a nasty cold to tips for living a heart-healthy lifestyle.

There’s no doubt it’s effective. However, it also takes incredible resources, something many lean hospital marketing teams just don’t have. Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how the right partner can enable your organization to leverage content marketing efforts in a scalable way, helping you grow your brand, your audience, and your patient base.

You’ll learn:

• Trends in healthcare content marketing — who’s doing it, what’s stopping the rest, and why it matters to today’s consumers and patients
• Why SEO and keyword research help you tap into who your audience is and what matters to them
• Why governance standards — including style guides, editorial calendars, core strategy statements, and workflows — can help align your team and brand goals
• The importance of sharing your content everywhere: email newsletters, on your homepage, through social channels, and more
• How a partner can help you do all of this, plus measure your success and provide metrics to keep you moving forward

Health systems are competing for the ability to meet consumers in their moments of need — what Google calls “micro-moments” — those moments when a consumer turns to his or her device to know, go, do, or buy. Are you better than your competitors at winning these micro-moments? If you’re not sure, these situations may sound familiar:

“We primarily rely on service-line leaders, executives, and other team members to tell us what they’re hearing from patients and others in the community about what our competitors are doing and how their programs compare.”

“My team and I run across new functionality every now and then while visiting competitor sites, but we don’t formally document it.”

“Our patient advisory groups share competitive information. So we generally know what our competition is up to.”

While helpful, anecdotal information isn’t enough to prove what your competitors are offering in the digital space. You need to use cold, hard data as the basis for producing a thoughtful assessment of where you stand in relation to the competition, especially if you need this data to help prove the need for an increase in budget or team size. You also need a logical and effective way to organize competitive information to help you convey it most effectively to stakeholders.

This is where a digital competitive analysis comes in.

Set Yourself Up for Success with a Digital Competitive Analysis

A digital competitive analysis provides valuable insight into current initiatives that help to improve performance, evolve digital marketing strategies, and gain actionable insight that can help you achieve both short- and long-term goals. And, it provides a framework for presenting information in a clear way that will resonate with leadership. No more relying on anecdotal evidence alone!

You may be thinking: Using competitive information to inform your digital strategies, even while rooted in data, is just fodder for keeping up with the proverbial Joneses. It can seem this way on the surface, and your goals and objectives absolutely need to align organizationally and shouldn’t be determined solely based on what your competitors are doing. But without a deep understanding of your competitors’ digital strengths and weaknesses as well as your own, you’re missing critical information that’s likely leaving a hole in your strategies and resulting in a digital roadmap that may be off-course.

In addition to gleaning actionable insights about how your competitors are reaching consumers and patients in the same markets — and how effectively — your analysis can serve as a benchmark by which you can review your performance going forward. In general, a digital competitive analysis can help you understand the following in relation to your competitors:

• How your channel mix compares
• How much traffic your site receives vs. your competition
• Functionality differences
• Overall user experience
• Team size and roles comparison
• Where you’re ahead of the pack
• Where you’re behind
• Areas for improvement
• Opportunities for or threats to patient acquisition or retention that require short- and/or long-term strategies and action

So let’s say one of your direct competitors has a robust email marketing effort to support their cancer program, for example — complete with a variety of different e-newsletters, some even personalized to individual preference, as well as drip campaigns that guide subscribers through different stages of the cancer patient journey. If cancer is one of your key service lines but you’re not sending email of any kind related to that particular service line, or you are but not as comprehensively, that’s a potential threat.

Here’s another scenario: If your competitors offer online appointment scheduling while you’re only offering an appointment request form that requires a call back to the patient, that is also a threat. Your competitors have set a new benchmark for convenience in your market, and that’s critical for you to understand as you formulate both short- and long-term strategies and assign budget. Based on this, you might prioritize talking with operations and IT about developing a process for managing online appointment scheduling over and above other potential strategies so you can make the move sooner rather than later.

Also, you may find through your analysis that most of your competitors are using a broader mix of digital marketing channels than you are, and that information can help you make a case for an increase in budget or team size in order to become more competitive.

Data presented in a visually compelling way can help executives see the need for new functionality that they otherwise may have overlooked in favor of other initiatives. If you’ve had trouble getting leadership on board to support new online initiatives that others in your market are already offering, being able to show that — and speak to how that’s increased consumer expectations that you’re not meeting — can be incredibly powerful.

Competitive Analysis Steps

It’s easier to conduct an analysis and report out on the results than you may think, but it will still take time and resources. Follow these steps:

Once you have all of this information collected, it’s time to start your analysis. A simple and effective way to approach and structure an analysis is to use the traditional SWOT framework (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). I also recommend creating charts to show how you compare to your competitors in functionality and channel usage. A simple table format that has different digital functionality noted across the top and your organization and your competitors listed down the left-hand side marked with Xs to indicate who offers what, is an easy way to compile results. The resulting visual quickly showcases either how far ahead or how far behind your organization is in each area.

From there, you can then take the time to review results and assess each channel and functionality to gain deeper, more meaningful insights that will help you flesh out your SWOT analysis. Once you have your general findings compiled, you can follow a format like this to produce a formal report:

• Background/Purpose
• Competitors
• Overall findings (consider reporting out by Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)
• Conclusions
• Sources
• Appendices for supporting data

Once completed, you’ll be well-positioned to share your analysis with your larger team, boss, key stakeholders, and decision makers. And, you’ll have baseline data you can use to benchmark your performance and progress against both yourself and competitors at whatever frequency makes sense for your organization.

Meeting Consumers in their Micro-Moments

A digital competitive analysis is just one tool in your arsenal, but an often-overlooked one that can help you better meet consumers in their micro-moments and help you change the perception of your department as a cost center to one that’s focused on improving the top and bottom lines. And that is worth all the time and effort you’ll put into it.

Geonetric helps healthcare systems and hospitals stay on top of digital trends, develop strategies, and measure results. We produce digital competitive analyses for clients, and we can help you too! Contact us today.

Amazon. Apple. CVS Health. As leaders in using data, technology, and consumer marketing to disrupt their fields, it’s clear these organizations will have some impact on how community hospitals and health systems design online experiences.

Watch this webinar and learn the top digital marketing trends to watch for in 2019. We’ll break down some of the intriguing moves in the industry and how you can use data, technology, and user experience to:

• Focus on consumers through A/B testing, personalization, and multi-channel digital campaigns
• Stay-up-to-date with guidelines and exceed consumer expectations around pricing transparency and accessibility
• Build designed experiences using the latest technology such as AI and chatbots, as well as deepening integrations across the technology stack
• Understand changes in the search space and how to leverage voice and location-based search to stand out in a crowded market

The best place to start when considering the implications of voice search on your hospital or healthcare system’s marketing strategy is to understand how it’s being used today and why. Here are a few statistics:

• 55% of teens use voice search daily (Google)
• 41% of adults use voice search daily (Google)
• 30% use voice search to obtain faster results (MindMeld)
• 24% use voice search when it’s difficult to type on a smart phone or other devices (MindMeld)

In general, the primary reason why people use voice search boils down to one common theme: convenience. And that convenience factor is underscored by the types of voice searches people are doing today. While some use voice search for entertainment, to shop, or to switch off their lights or operate in-home devices, the vast majority of voice searches are related to information retrieval . Which is not surprising given our expectation for immediate information and answers – those “micro-moments,” a term coined by Google, where we turn to our devices to know, go, do or buy.

And of these informational searches – these micro moments -, more than half involve finding something local. In fact, Bright Local reports that 58 percent of consumers have used voice search to find local information within the last year.

Drive Patients in Your Doors with Local Listings & Featured Snippets

Bottom-of-the-funnel searches – searches where consumers are looking to take immediate action – represent the best opportunity for hospitals and health systems to win in the voice search space today. Specifically, both local listings and featured snippets offer an opportunity to convert consumers to patients.

Since healthcare has largely caught up to other industries in understanding the value of and devising strategies and tactics around text-based search engine optimization (SEO), there’s a good chance you’ve already taken steps that positively impact voice searches without even realizing it. But that’s not to say that your current SEO and content strategy won’t need some adjusting.

So let’s take a look at each opportunity more closely:

1) Local listings

The most popular digital assistants – Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, and Samsung Bixby – use Google, Bing, or Yelp – or a combination of – to return local information. For example, when someone asks Google for the closest urgent cares to them, Alexa responds with information it pulls from Yelp to return “popular” results, Siri uses Google, and Microsoft relies on Bing.

So, good news! All that time and effort you’ve been spending to claim and optimize your local listings has been time well spent.

The not so good news? If you haven’t claimed your listings on any other platform than Google My Business, you likely won’t show up in voice search results for voice assistants that use Bing or Yelp – or the information returned about your organization may be incomplete or inaccurate. So you’ll want to understand what devices are being used most often in your market and devise a plan to tackle other voice search sources, such as Bing Places for Business and Yelp, as next steps.

When it comes to voice search, ensuring your organization is optimized across multiple data sources can mean the difference between business walking through your doors or your competitors’.

2) Featured snippets

The efforts you’ve put into optimizing your service line and other content for SEO can also result in opportunities to garner what’s called a Featured Snippet spot on Google.

Featured snippets are blocks of text that appear at the top of Google search results (Fig. 2).

Not only is this very valuable search real estate, but it’s also a huge asset for voice search visibility. Featured snippets are often what voice assistants read as answers to users’ questions. They can appear as text, lists, tables and video, but currently most voice answers (about 65 percent) come from text-only featured snippet results.

To snag a featured snippet spot, it’s important to understand that people search differently using their voice than when using traditional typed searches. Voice search is more conversational, using longer phrases and complete sentences. Because of this difference, it’s important to research how people talk about the questions they have, and then shift how you write your content slightly to answer those questions.

However, we DO NOT recommend you start rewriting all of your existing content! Dip your toe in the featured snippets water by conducting small experiments and see what kinds of results you get.

We DO recommend you:

• Focus primarily on opportunities around bottom-of-the-funnel searches, where you have greater potential for visibility. Competing with Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and other similar organizations with nation-wide reach and authority and who are most likely to appear for top of the funnel searches, may not be worth your time (unless you offer a very unique service). However, search is of course always changing so you’ll definitely want to stay on top of trends. What doesn’t work today may work in the future!
• Always make sure your efforts are tied to strategy; there’s nothing worse than spending time and effort to grab a featured snippet spot about bunions when your organization really wants to drive knee surgeries.
• Keep in mind that you’re more apt to snag a featured snippet spot if you already rank on the first page of search results for a particular phrase or keyword.
• Use the “People Also Ask” results in Google, which are pulled from voice searches, to help you understand what content people are searching for. Including these phrases in your content could help you show up in voice search results.

Bottom Line: The Best Approach is a Strategic One

When it comes to voice search, the best approach is a strategic one. Keep your efforts focused on your overall organization and marketing goals. Don’t try to take on too much at once – start with a focus on local listings – then experiment a bit with featured snippets and see what kind of results you get.

It’s also helpful to try out the different voice-enabled devices on the market today to get a feel for how answers are returned. Interacting with them is also a great way to remove unknowns and reduce anxiety if you’re feeling overwhelmed (plus, it’s fun and definitely entertaining). Keep tabs on what your competitors are doing in the voice search space, and read up on the latest information – including additional posts – this is a fast-moving space!

Above all, remember that voice search is just another part of your overall SEO and content strategy, not a separate initiative. That alone will help you keep voice search where it belongs – in perspective. Good luck! Let us know how it goes.

Geonetric helps health care systems and hospitals stay on top of digital trends, and we’d love to help your organization, too! For guidance on voice search or other digital marketing trends, contact us.