The Key to Social Success: Aligning with Organizational Objectives

Only 26% of leading healthcare marketers that responded to our 2017 Digital Marketing Trends survey indicated they had an editorial calendar for their social media efforts, and 39% of respondents reported that they plan as they go. This leaves lots of opportunity for your work and content – and the focus of each – to go astray. Which means that the work you’re doing may or may not be creating value for your followers or your organization.

To help ensure that your social media efforts are working as hard for you as possible, start by developing a set of social media objectives that tie directly to your organizational goals, then follow these five steps to flush out a plan:

1. Review your organization’s goals and determine which ones social media can support. Not all of your organization’s goals will be a good fit for social media. But for those that are, think through how social can best support them. Some may not be immediately obvious. For example, if an organizational objective is to improve the patient experience, offering top-notch customer service through your social channels could be a key objective for your social media program.
2. Develop strategies that support your social objectives. Objectives define what you hope to accomplish, and strategies define how you will get there. For example, if one of your organizational objectives is to grow revenue through the launch of a new service line, a key social strategy could be to ensure that all marketing campaigns your team develops for the new service line have a social component to them, along with defined, measurable goals.
3. Create tactics to support your strategies. In the patient experience example above, one of your strategies could be to provide outstanding patient care and support. To do so, a tactic might be to respond to all patient complaints within 12 or 24 hours, or to publish patient satisfaction survey comments. If you’re already publishing patient ratings and reviews for your doctors, consider pulling those into social media.
4. Determine your KPIs and how you’ll measure. Determining how you’ll measure the effectiveness of each of your tactics, how often, what tools you’ll use to do so (or what ones you may need to seek out), and routinely measuring results is critical. If you can link any of your social results to ROI or return on marketing expense, definitely do so. Setting goals in Google Analytics can help you achieve this. Tracking marketing success in general, let alone social media success, is hard for healthcare marketers. Our study showed that although almost all respondents consistently track engagement and reach, getting to conversions and ROI is difficult. Lack of time, lack of skillset and inadequate tools often top the list of reasons why. If this sounds like your organization, don’t be afraid to turn to your digital agency for help – proving your department’s success is worth the small investment in outsourcing.
5. Produce reports and share them routinely. Proactively and routinely distribute the results of your social media work with leaders, team members and others in your organization who have a stake in the outcome. Make sure you show results in relation to your social media strategies and how those strategies tie directly to organizational goals. One effective way to do this is to create a document that shows organizational objectives, social objectives, strategies, tactics, KPIs, and results grouped together so it’s easy for others to visualize.

Prove Your Efforts to C-Suite

Taking the time to develop and document objectives, strategies, tactics, KPIs, and then measuring and proactively reporting can be time-consuming. Doing so, though, will help you answer the tough questions you’re likely to get if you haven’t already – or even fend them off before they’re asked. Best of all, they’ll help you know if all that work you’re doing is actually moving your organization in the right direction, and will allow you to correct course if not.

So when your CMO or CFO walks into your office one day wondering just exactly how social media is contributing to the organization and why we’re spending time on it, you can simply pull out your latest report and confidently answer. Need help crafting a social media strategy? We’d love to help! Contact us today.

Providers with formal agreements, partnerships, or other leadership roles within your organization may have certain ideas about where they should be listed in online search results. Yet, you must consider both the experience for the end user of your directory, as well as how you are going to comply with legal requirements such as Stark Laws.

As an organization who helps systems of all sizes effectively build and launch provider directories, here are some tips we’ve learned along the way that will help as you create a user-friendly — and provider-friendly — directory.

Understanding your organization is key
To begin, it’s important that you have a thorough understanding of the provider makeup of your organization. Learn as much as you can about the size and composition of your medical staff, including what partnerships are in place. Reach out to your physician relations team and key providers in leadership positions, to not only learn about your organization’s unique makeup, but to also get those important stakeholders on board early.

It’s also best to check with your legal team on questions concerning legal constraints that may limit your ability to provide special treatment for one non-employed doctor over another. While one provider may be a great partner and another may do little or no business with your organization, to stay in compliance, we always recommend that providers with similar status be handled consistently.

Always attempt to match your searcher’s query
When a health consumer visits your site and searches for a provider, they have certain expectations you need to meet. They might search by distance, by conditions the provider treats, by insurance, or by providers who are accepting new patients. Some of these factors might filter results, while others might best be implemented as prioritization and sorting elements. This search result is typically called “best match” and looks at the taxonomy terms entered in the search criteria and returns the best results first.

Your goal should always be to give the visitor the results that best match what they appear to be searching for.

But after taking search factors in consideration, how the results display are up to you — and the capabilities of your platform.

Ways to structure search results with fairness in mind
After the best match, most directories then apply either an alphabetical or random sort. Alphabetical results by provider’s last name is the most common way a directory lists results – but that certainly isn’t fair to your medical staff, especially those with last names toward the end of the alphabet.

There are many other ways to list results in a way that meets your users’ needs and is more fair to your providers. Some ways to answer this question:

• Randomization is good in many cases, and is certainly the most common across the industry, but it isn’t the only way.
• Some criteria can be used for sorting rather than filtering. Distance search is a great example. Your site could return all results within a particular distance of a given zip code or it could return all results ordered by distance with equidistant options then being sorted as discussed above.
• Some organizations show physicians with formal affiliation groups separately. For example, on a different tab or returning only affiliated providers and then requiring an additional click to “show all physicians”.
• VitalSite Provider Directory allows our clients to use SmartPanels and custom panels to display results based on sophisticated taxonomy filters. For example, Gundersen Health, headquartered in La Crosse, WI, uses panels to differentiate between onsite, visiting, and telemedicine providers at the Decorah, IA facility.
• You have the most flexibility with listings for your employed physicians. However, you do run the risk of alienating good partners who aren’t employed. Still, highlighting employed providers is common.
• Some organizations use special design treatments to draw attention to certain providers in search results, as Bryan Health, located in Lincoln, NE, did with their physician network and heart doctors.

Remember, you have the power to determine who you’re going to include in your directory. Non-employed providers without special status should be handled consistently, but you don’t need to include every provider in the U.S.

Search results and user confusion
What happens when a user runs a search query and sees five providers, clicks on one doctor, then goes back to the query? Do they see the same five providers in the same order or has it changed? What if they run a query today, and then come back and run the same query tomorrow? Are the results the same?

In our experience, we recommend that the results remain the same for the length of the session or until the visitor runs a new search, as this reduces user confusion. But a certain doctor who keeps refreshing the page until they see their name might not agree.

These scenarios illustrate the fact that many issues can come up when working through search results — as well as many solutions. Be sure to work with the team building your directory to understand how you will navigate some of these scenarios. When possible, always rule in favor or what creates the best experience for your site visitor.

Learning from search behavior
If you’re getting ready to embark on a provider directory redesign, take the time to focus on user search patterns and behavior. Learn how your site visitors use your current provider directory, taking special note of where they struggle.

Once you have a clear understanding of your users and their search behavior, you can build logic into your search functionality to help them get the most accurate results, while also meeting organizational goals such as favoring employed over non-employed providers.

If you have specific questions about your provider directory, or are looking for a new platform that better meets your needs, we’d be happy to help.

Your thought process and in-house discussions might have included gems like:

“We really need this particular service line or feature to stand out.”

“This service line will just get lost on the main site!”

“Our top revenue-generating departments need their own presence on the web to keep up their performance.”

“We need this section to be more competitive. It needs to really pop.”

These are valid concerns. Especially in today’s increasingly competitive healthcare market, it can be a challenge to figure out how to get your most needed or “in-demand” services before prospective patients in the most effective way.

Healthcare Website Options: A Complicated Decision

The sticky question of whether your main site, a microsite, or a landing page works best for your organization’s specific needs gets even more complicated when we’re talking about the fast-changing world of healthcare marketing. Healthcare organizations often have:

• Numerous locations across multiple geographic areas
• Stakeholders that include not only executives, providers, and patients, but also donors
• Targeted services that sometimes need extra boosts to stand out among competitors

Landing Pages: Mainly for Marketing Campaigns

Before we delve into the “microsite versus main site” question, let’s tackle landing pages.

Though the term “landing page” is often used broadly, we’re using it here to refer to a single page posted on your main site or a relevant microsite for marketing purposes. Landing pages should have a focused call to action as part of a temporary, inbound healthcare marketing campaign.

Their goal is to convert page visitors to a specific action. Landing pages feature little navigation, and use a design intended to connect the user with your temporary campaign.

We’ve provided templates for many organizations’ landing pages. One great example is the “Where Hearts Beat Strong” campaign, from UNC Rex Healthcare, that showcases the organization’s coordinated heart and vascular care options.

When Does a Microsite Work?

Microsites are larger than landing pages, and usually smaller than a full site.

Microsites are useful when you need to highlight a part of your organization that has a distinct following. Another scenario that may call for a microsite is when you have a highly specialized location – such as a fitness facility or cancer center – and need to give it a stronger presence to stay competitive.

Here’s a few examples from out clients:

• The University of Missouri wanted to bolster the microsite for its Sinclair School of Nursing. We helped make it happen by updating the microsite’s content, making use of fresh tools and plug-ins, and creating a design that connected with both the university and its healthcare system. The microsite extended the university’s brand by using its school colors.
• Avera Health turned to us for a redesign of their main site and worked with us on a microsite focused on its eCare telemedicine network.
• Cone Health is another client who used our services for its main site and wanted a microsite that focused specifically on their medical group.
• Bronson Healthcare turned to us for its Bronson Positivity microsite to highlight and receive patient testimonials.

The Downside of Microsites

While microsites have their purpose, the truth is that usually your main website is the best place for most of your service lines and content. Here’s why:

• Your users and followers can be confused by a microsite. They may not realize or understand how a microsite fits in with the rest of your organization – and your microsite could end up being among your main site’s top competitors.
• A separate microsite means more work for you as an organization. You’ll have two sites to update and maintain instead of a single main site. This situation can become overwhelming, and maintenance of your microsite can easily fall through the cracks over time.
• Microsites are an added cost – not only in staff time to maintain them, but to build them. They typically require additional content strategy and navigation, and their own design or branding elements.
• You may find that giving one part of your organization a microsite will trigger other departments to want one, too. Saying “yes” to a microsite for one section, and “no” to another, can be difficult. At minimum, you’ll need a web governance plan that clearly outlines who is making what decisions about your web presence, and for what reasons.

There you have it: a broad construct to help you approach the increasingly complex puzzle of which web presences your organization needs, when, and why.

If you want to know more, you can turn to us to help answer your questions. We have years of experience in content strategy, digital healthcare marketing, understanding your organization’s needs, and analyzing your healthcare site’s traffic and potential. We’ll help you make the most of all the tools in your reach – and maybe even help you discover new ones.

To do this, you have to get beyond the lists of academic degrees, certifications, and professional society memberships. Certainly, those achievements are all key facts to include in a provider’s profile because they show expertise and inspire confidence. But many patients want to know even more about the provider who’ll come to know them on an intimately personal level.

“Likability” factors—such as bedside manner, listening skills, and a sense of caring—are some of the top factors patients use to evaluate a doctor, according to a survey conducted in 2014 by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs at the University of Chicago. Before patients see a provider for the first time, they’ll try to judge his or her likability based on what’s ideally an engaging, well-written biography that portrays a relatable human being.

Interviewing Your Doctors
To help a potential patient get to know your providers, ask the doctors about:

• How they approach care (Are they efficient and straightforward? Do they want to make patients feel comfortable and secure?)
• How and why they decided to enter medicine and a particular specialty
• What they find rewarding about their career
• What patients can expect during an appointment
• How the providers spend free time (e.g., with family, hobbies or community involvement, especially any activities that tie into health, wellness, or medical care)

Whenever possible, interview providers in person or by phone. You’ll be able to ask follow-up queries, and you’ll likely end up with more—and more interesting—information than you’d get through email. But for providers who are hard to reach, your best option might be sending questions electronically.

Videos also go a long way in familiarizing a patient with a provider. Hearing a physician’s voice helps potential patients sense his or her personality, and it’s the next-best thing to a face-to-face meeting.

Wherever you add videos, try to include a transcript and/or manually written captions (not YouTube’s messy auto-captions) to make the content accessible to a wider audience. Captioning can also make the videos more shareable on social media, where videos sometimes autoplay without sound.

Prioritize Your Efforts
Which providers should you prioritize for creating expanded profiles? Consider those who are:

• New to your organization or local region
• Specialists in an area of healthcare that’s an organizational marketing priority
• Primary care providers, especially pediatricians, whom patients often carefully evaluate because the PCP-patient relationship is particularly long and important

Get Physicians to Participate
Let’s be real: not every provider on your wish list will cooperate, at least initially. Try these tactics to boost your success rate:

• Start with the providers you think are most likely to participate. Use their new, expanded biographies as examples to show the more-reluctant doctors what they can expect.
• Track before-and-after appointment requests for the newly profiled providers, and compare the results to those of similar providers who stuck with basic profiles. Use the data to bolster your case to the holdouts. (Check out how PIH Health saw a 182 percent increase in pageviews after rewriting and redesigning its provider profiles.)
• Take advantage of peer pressure. Make sure the providers on your list know if their competitors – or a well-respected doctor in your health system – have content-rich profiles.

Writing Physician Bios
A well-rounded provider profile includes two main types of information: professional and personal. The former includes essentials such as the physician’s:

• Specialty
• Conditions treated
• Insurance plans accepted
• Academic degrees and certifications
• Honors and awards
• Professional experience
• Clinical interests

Display this information in an easy-to-scan list with clear, specific headers. For example:

Education
Medical School
Medical College of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Residency
Medical College of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Fellowship
University of Missouri – Kansas City – Kansas City, Missouri

Board Certifications
American Board of Orthopedic Surgery
Orthopedic Sports Medicine

Personal information – the kind you’ll get when asking the questions mentioned earlier – doesn’t fit neatly into a bulleted list. Write this content in narrative style, taking care not to repeat professional information. Save this section for content that wouldn’t make it onto a CV. If it matches your organization’s voice and tone, use the words “I” and “you” instead of “Dr. Johnson” and “patients” to make users feel the provider is talking straight to them. Consider this example:

My nursing background helps me better understand your everyday health concerns. I see you and the rest of my patients as part of a big family. A Springville native, I love spending time with my husband, Sam, and two grown daughters. When the weather’s nice, you might find me going for a bike ride or hiking the trails. I tell my patients to enjoy as much physical activity as possible, and I take my own advice!

Physician Marketing Strategies
After you take time to write high-quality profiles, don’t forget to promote that content! Download Geonetric’s physician promotion guide for comprehensive advice about everything from your online doctor directory to SEO, social media, and content marketing.

P4$$w0rd$ That Are Hard for Humans to Remember
These rules make it all but impossible for users to remember their passwords. At its core, it’s a usability issue. We’re making the process of authentication very difficult for the average person because, following that same logic, it should make it more difficult for criminals.

Unfortunately, what actually occurs is that users engage in a set of compensating behaviors such as writing passwords on sticky notes or using the same passwords for multiple accounts that ultimately make accounts less secure.

Just as importantly, these requirements make passwords only nominally more secure. As a security strategy, this type of complexity protects against the wrong attack scenario. In other words, the primary threat isn’t a TV sitcom scenario in which roommates try to guess your password. The more likely threat is a software program systematically trying combinations until it gets things right. This scenario becomes more and more likely as computers get faster.

This difference is explained particularly well by geek comic XKCD.

New Guidelines on Digital Identity Released
All of this has lead NIST to issue a new set of recommendations as part of its updated Digital Identity Guidelines, released in June.

The guidelines are extensive, but here are some of the more meaningful new insights:

• Password length is more important than complexity.
• Remove requirements for complexity (upper/lower/numbers/spaces, etc.).
• Add a broader set of valid characters (emoji in your passwords, anyone?).
• Don’t auto-expire passwords.

Overall, the guidelines also embrace the notion that good user security requires a holistic approach, which means looking at how accounts are created, how passwords and account names are recovered when forgotten, how this information is stored, and how failed login attempts are handled.

What This Means for Developers
The guidelines encourage the hard work to fall on system developers rather than on users. To that end, there is a lot of guidance in the documents (some new, some existing) on how developers should put together systems that are less vulnerable to password-related attacks:

• Never display or email the clear-text password.
• One-way encrypt (a technique known as salting) passwords for storage. This prevents hackers from gaining access to passwords that they can use on other websites even if they do gain access to the database.
• Use lock out rules to limit the effectiveness of brute-force password guessing attacks.
• Don’t use a pre-determined set of challenge questions (or, if you do, make that list very long).

Looking forward, the guidelines encourage the use of risk-based adaptive techniques for authentication. In other words, make typical logins easy with the caveat that when something unusual is observed, make the user jump through additional security hoops. Higher risk scenarios might include logging in from a new computer, from a different country, or after a set of failed login attempts.

The Security of Your Content Management System (CMS)
If you manage your CMS in-house, take a moment to consider what the changes mean for your website security. If you work with a vendor, ask if they have plans to improve their security in light of these new recommendations.

At Geonetric, we develop software that is continually improving. Our product team keeps a watchful eye on industry trends, and we upgrade and update our CMS, VitalSite™ on a regular basis to provide new and improved functionality and security.

These changing security recommendations come at an opportune time as we’re launching a completely overhauled authentication and user management system for VitalSite, as well as our other applications. As we’re performing these upgrades it’s exciting to know that we can make life far easier for our clients by making their passwords less onerous, and at the same time, make them more secure.

By popular request we did a bit of a deep dive into metadata and looked at the various formats it takes. Watch this video to learn everything from Schema.org to open graph. We’ll discuss how metadata can impact your website’s findability and performance.

You will learn:

• The healthcare-specific metadata you need to pay attention to for physicians, medical facilities, and services
• How content on your site can impact your appearance in search, including rich snippets, stars and ratings, and business listings
• The markup that can impact your social media engagement and how people share your content
• Strategies for solving sticky problems like internal competition between departments or entities within a health system
• And more…

Between user search trends and fierce local keyword competition, it’s more important than ever to ensure patients find you online. In this webinar, you’ll learn about the importance of building out your website with a focus on locations and tips for improving rankings for local search terms.

Attend this webinar and learn how to:

• Build a content strategy that matches potential patients’ search motivations.
• Uncover the technical opportunities that are holding your local search back, including optimizing title and meta description tags and using local structured data markup.
• Make decisions about content strategy, design, and functionality that balances consumer expectations and the needs of your organization.
• Create a strategy to ensure multiple locations of the same health system don’t compete with each other in search results.
• Ensure you’re correctly claiming and optimizing business listings.

But as a healthcare marketer, doctors aren’t the only providers you need to promote. Healthcare organizations are increasingly relying on mid-level providers as well, with research indicating the number of nurse practitioners will double by 2025.

Attend this webinar to learn how current trends in healthcare and consumer behavior intersect, and what it means for your digital marketing. After the webinar, you’ll be able to:

• Align your physician promotion strategy with trends in consumer behavior
• Make the case for online ratings and reviews
• Decide which tactics are most effective for your physician promotion efforts
• Create a plan to move your provider marketing efforts to the next level

Internet registry company dotHealth released the domain “.health” last month, making it available for organizations that provide healthcare or health information, market health products or services, or develop health-related technologies. The intention of the domain is to help consumers find reliable health information on the web. Mayo Clinic, United Healthcare, and Johnson & Johnson have already registered for .health domains, as have Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Should you follow suit? The short answer is yes.

Benefits of a .health domain

Reserving a .health domain for your organization is important for a few reasons, including the fact it:

• Protects your brand: If you don’t buy your domain, another organization can. And you’d have no control over what content is posted on that domain. This puts your brand at risk. Even if you decide not to use the .health domain, reserving it ensures that you are in control of how it does – or does not – get used.
• Provides new marketing opportunities: The potential for differentiating yourself from your competition abounds with new TLDs. There are multiple ways your organization can take advantage at a system level and a service line level – consider www.abchospital.health, or abchospital.heart.health.
• Saves money down the road: You’ve probably heard of someone buying a domain and then “holding it hostage.” When this happens to a domain you want to purchase, you’ll likely have to spend a significant amount of money to purchase that domain back.
• Offers a potential SEO impact: No one knows exactly what the effect of .health domains will be on search. But if Google decides to give extra weight to .health URLs in the future, your investment could pay big dividends.

How to get the .health domain

Since the goal of .health is to provide reliable health information on the web, organizations interested in purchasing the domain must go through an application and qualification process. The first step is to get an Industry Access token from dotHealth. You must submit your application for a token before 11:00 a.m. on November 29, 2017. 

Must-Know Intel About the Mobile-First Index

To help you better understand the current state of affairs about this new index so you can prepare your website for what’s to come, we’ve outlined the top several things that are important for you to know:

There Will Only Be One Index

There will be one—and only one—index. When news of the mobile-first index initially broke, it was implied that there would be separate desktop and mobile indexes. That has been confirmed by Google to no longer be the case. There will be only one index, and that index will be mobile-first. That means the ranking criteria that Google thinks is important for a mobile device will also impact how sites rank on desktop.

The Launch Date Has Been Moved Back

The switch to the mobile-first index isn’t likely to happen before midway through 2018 at the earliest. The official rollout date for this change has shifted several times, though, so consider this a fuzzy estimate.

Tabs & Accordions Will No Longer Be Devalued

Currently, Google devalues content within tabs and accordions, as it assumes the content must not be as important as the visible content on the page if it’s hidden. However, Google understands that for the best mobile user experience, it’s sometimes helpful to place content within accordions or tabs to reduce long-scroll pages.

When the mobile-first index hits, content within tabs and accordions will no longer be devalued. This will be the case on both desktop and mobile since one index will be used for both. Until then, however, content within tabs and accordions will continue to be devalued.

The Mobile Version of Your Site Will Be the Source of Truth

Your mobile site is what will be indexed, not your desktop site. For those of you with a responsive site, this isn’t a problem or an area of concern. However, if you have a separate mobile site that’s different from desktop (e.g., less content), the mobile site is what Google will crawl for indexing purposes.

Further, if you have certain content set to hide on mobile, it’s possible that content will be excluded from the index since Google isn’t likely to crawl your desktop site.

(Note: This doesn’t apply to content within tabs and accordions.)

Change Is a Certainty

Accept that all of this may change over the next couple of weeks.

Stay on Track with a Good UX

Nothing at this point is a guarantee. We may wake up tomorrow with updated news that shifts our understanding of what is to come.

But there’s still something you can do to prepare: Focus on your users. From SEO to design to content strategy, it’s all about your users. As long as you’re keeping them in mind and creating your website to best meet their needs, you shouldn’t have a lot of catching up to do.